AlterNet.org: Jane Slaughterhttp://www.alternet.org/authors/jane-slaughter
enThe Subtle, Insidious Game of Undermining Social Security From Withinhttp://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/subtle-insidious-game-undermining-social-security-within
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Social Security unionists see serious threats to the program coming from the inside.</div></div></div>
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--> <p>When the Alliance for Retired Americans <a href="http://labornotes.org/2012/11/%E2%80%98grand-bargain%E2%80%99-would-be-social-security-swindle">rallied at an Orlando Social Security office November 8,</a> workers came out, spoke to the crowd, and said they would put up “Don’t Cut My Social Security” signs in their cubicles.</p><p>Social Security unionists see threats to the program from the inside, in some ways more subtle than benefit cuts, but just as insidious over the long run.</p><p>Jim Campana is an officer in the Government Employees (AFGE) union representing Social Security workers in Lansing, Michigan. He says that after President George W. Bush lost his bid to privatize the program in 2005, “the first thing he did was destroy the security part of Social Security. It used to be that people knew it would be there for them. Now a lot of people have lost that confidence.”</p><p>Dana Duggins, a vice president of AFGE Council 220, said administrators have been on a mission “to strip away the reasons why the public rejected privatization.”</p><p>Management is making the program less efficient and less user-friendly, and enforcing methods that wrongly lower benefits, while nurturing the seed of doubt that Social Security can last.</p><p><strong>Filing Online</strong></p><p>Michael Astrue, the Social Security Administration (SSA) commissioner appointed by Bush, went full throttle with an internet claims system. Those seeking retirement or disability benefits are encouraged to fill out forms online.</p><p>But with I-claims, Duggins says, “85 percent of the time the person is disadvantaging themselves. They complete the information based on what their neighbor told them. They’re guessing.”</p><p>The commissioner, who will be in office until January 2013, has insisted that employees not question information on the applications. “He says everybody these days has their own financial advisor,” Duggins said. “This is the elitist attitude he works from.”</p><p>AFGE has surveyed claims representatives, who receive 12 to 16 weeks of intense training to know the system, and found them unhappy with I-claims.</p><p>“We are trained to pay the right person the right amount at the right time and not play games with people’s livelihoods,” Duggins said. “The old-timers have always had the ethics of going the extra mile to make sure you’re being paid correctly. Now the policy’s changed to ‘you no longer question this.’</p><p>“We have employees all over that take the effort to do it anyway.”</p><p><strong>Speed-up</strong></p><p>Employees are supposed to review online claims, but only by working them in around their face-to-face appointments—and both personnel and overtime have been cut drastically. SSA will soon be down to 45,000 AFGE-represented members, from 53,000 in 2010. Overtime was cut to 17,000 hours this year, less than a half-hour annually per worker, and will be zero in the next fiscal year.</p><p>Offices are also closing earlier.</p><p>To top it off, as of October 1, taxpayers are no longer mailed annual statements of their accumulated benefits. “That benefit statement reiterates to young folks, ‘you are getting something back,’” Duggins said. “Take that away and it allows for the doubts to creep in.”</p><p>Astrue says he’ll save $70 million by canceling the paper statements. But employees doubt that saving money is really his top priority—since he’s also building a $55 million fence around headquarters.</p><p> </p> Wed, 09 Jan 2013 07:59:00 -0800Jane Slaughter, Labor Notes773754 at http://www.alternet.orgNews & PoliticsEconomyLaborNews & PoliticsAFGE CouncilAmerican Federation of Government EmployeesCandidate PositionDana Dugginsgeorge w. bushgovernmentJim CampanalaborlansingmichiganPerson CareerPerson LocationpresidentPublic economicsQuotationsocial issuesSocial Security Administrationsocial securityUSDcommissionerfinancial advisorinternet claims systemofficeronline claimsvice president10,000 Protesters Converge on Michigan Capitol as Gov. Snyder's Assault on Workers' Rights Signed Into Lawhttp://www.alternet.org/labor/10000-protesters-converge-michigan-capitol-gov-snyders-assault-workers-rights-signed-law
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Things got dicey in Lansing when protesters took down a tent erected on Capitol grounds by the Koch-funded Americans For Prosperity, as lawmakers passed a law designed to eviscerate union membership rolls. </div></div></div>
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--> <p>Union protesters in front of the Michigan Capitol today knocked down an enormous tent erected by Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-brothers-funded group that helped bring right to work to the state. State troopers arriving on horseback were helpless, bringing to mind images of Humpty Dumpty and all the king’s men.</p><p>Several dozen protesters were sitting down in the Capitol Rotunda, risking arrest, and more were outside the governor’s office. Three school districts were forced to close schools because so many teachers called off for the day.</p><p>Four giant inflatable rats in the 10,000-person crowd were named for prominent Republican politicians and their richest backer.</p><p>But despite the anger and the chants, the legislature made it official. Gov. Rick “The Nerd” Snyder was expected to sign right-to-work bills tomorrow.</p><strong>Shocked</strong><p>Michigan unionists were shocked last Tuesday when Snyder announced his support for right to work. His legislative allies quickly did their part, passing the needed public and private sector bills last week as police used Mace to clear the Capitol of protesting union members.</p><p>Snyder had previously said right-to-work was too divisive and not on his agenda. Such laws outlaw union contracts that require all represented workers to pay dues, allowing members to resign and depleting union treasuries. United Auto Workers President Bob King, who has 151,000 members and 190,000 retirees in the state, said the governor’s about-face “blind-sided” him.</p><p>But the plan to make Michigan the 24th right-to-work state was long brewing. With 17.5 percent union density, the fifth-highest in the country, and a record of voting for Democratic presidents, Michigan was a tempting target for such billionaire-funded national groups as Americans for Prosperity (the Koch brothers) and for the state’s home-grown billionaire, Richard DeVos of the Amway fortune.</p><p>Writing in a <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/171663/pro-right-work-groups-michigan-outspend-union-counterparts#">blog</a> for The Nation, Lee Fang shows that Americans for Prosperity’s Michigan chapter quadrupled its spending in 2010, the year Snyder was elected, to $1.1 million. The Mackinac Center, a longtime right-wing think tank in the state, spent $5.7 million last year, and stepped up its game last week to support Snyder’s move. DeVos funds both groups.</p><strong>Long Time Coming</strong><p>Michigan Democratic Party Chair Mark Brewer dates the campaign for right to work to at least 2007. A <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DChq01XfG5c">video</a> shows former Michigan Republican Party Chair Ron Weiser speaking to a Tea Party meeting in August. Weiser, now finance chair of the Republican National Committee, describes meeting with DeVos, former Michigan Governor John Engler (now with the Business Roundtable), representatives from Americans for Prosperity, and Frank Keating, former governor of Oklahoma, which passed right to work in 2001. (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdoIFEKRreA">Here</a> the CEO of Oklahoma's Chamber of Commerce admits he can't name any companies that moved to Oklahoma because of right to work.)</p><p>Weiser: “We hired a political consultant, and I invested a bunch of money and time, and I was working on that full-time from October [2007] until March [2008]…. [After meeting with the above-named players], what we determined was that to win that election, and to be sure we were gonna win it, we couldn’t have a governor that was against it. So we decided to wait. Wait until we had a governor. Now we have a legislature and we have a governor.”</p><p>Those elements were in place by January 2011. But Snyder and the Republican majority in the legislature held off on right to work, perhaps warned by the tumult next door in Wisconsin that winter. Instead they pursued a <a href="http://labornotes.org/2011/10/michigan-unions-and-poor-face-85-hostile-laws">piecemeal strategy</a>, appointing “emergency managers” to run troubled cities and throw out union contracts, taking away teachers’ automatic dues deductions, rescinding domestic partner benefits for public employees, defining university research assistants, who were organizing, as non-workers, and a host of other measures that wouldn’t rile everyone at once.</p><strong>Attempt to Head Off Right to Work</strong><p>To head off right to work and to nullify all the laws that interfered with collective bargaining, the UAW’s King and other union leaders developed an offensive plan, to <a href="http://labornotes.org/2012/04/michigan-amendment-would-block-anti-union-legislation">pass a constitutional amendment</a>. Proposal 2, on the ballot last month, would have made collective bargaining a constitutional right in the state.</p><p>But Proposal 2 went down to defeat decisively, 57 to 42 percent. It fell victim to a $30 million disinformation campaign, with ads citing the sanctity of the constitution and warning that the bill would prevent school districts from firing child molesters.</p><p>Campaign leaders were reluctant to specify any particular laws that Proposal 2 would have outlawed, according to Mark O’Keefe, a staffer for the Detroit Federation of Teachers—presumably afraid that any specific was likely to offend someone. O’Keefe thought the vagueness “created uncertainty and mistrust” among voters, and that a simple ban on right-to-work would have stood a better chance.</p><p>The campaign seemed to come from nowhere, in any case. It was not the result of discussion within the union base. Community allies were approached after the decision was made.</p><p>And Ray Holman, legislative liaison for the UAW’s big state employees local, thinks the proactive strategy was actually a disadvantage. He contrasted the defeat with last year’s victory in Ohio, where voters saved collective bargaining rights by repealing Senate Bill 5. “They had an advantage because rights were taken away,” Holman said right after the vote. “Here it was a harder climb. If they passed right-to-work and then we tried to repeal it, we’d have a better chance.”</p><p>He probably won’t have the chance to find out. Legislators attached appropriations to the right-to-work bills, and money bills can’t be repealed by the citizens, in Michigan.</p><p>At the same time, though, O’Keefe noted that pre-election polls showed union members backing Proposal 2 by just two-thirds. “If we only get two-thirds within the unions, it’s not surprising we don’t get a majority overall,” he said.</p><strong>Who’s to Blame?</strong><p>Some now want to blame Bob King for Snyder’s initiative. If he hadn’t demonstrated to the world that unions aren’t that popular in Michigan, they say, Snyder might not have gotten the right-to-work idea. In addition, King angered Snyder by going for Proposal 2 even though Snyder asked him not to.</p><p>But it didn't take the defeat of Proposal 2 to alert Republicans to right to work, nor any desire for personal revenge on Snyder’s part. The Nerd, as he likes to be known, doesn’t have that personality. More likely he moved now because the balance of votes in the legislature will shift in January. Though they retained a majority in both houses, Republicans lost five seats in the House in November, and not all Republicans have been voting with the majority on right to work.</p><p>Stepping back, though, it is possible to partly blame the victim of this latest assault. The UAW is the leading union in Michigan, and it is the union that, over the last generation, led the way nationally on concessions of all kinds, from speedup on the job to labor-management participation schemes to two-tier pay. Though many remain loyal, it’s impossible to claim that the UAW is popular with its members.</p><p>At today’s rally, Teamsters President James Hoffa, who’s from Michigan, said the way back for unions will be a long fight. The slide down has been long, too, and now it’s accelerating.</p> Tue, 11 Dec 2012 13:25:00 -0800Jane Slaughter, Labor Notes759149 at http://www.alternet.orgLaborActivismEconomyLaborNews & PoliticsTea Party and the Rightuawamericans for prosperitykochprotestsright to workmichiganDueling California Measures Set to Tax Rich, Gut Unionshttp://www.alternet.org/labor/dueling-california-measures-set-tax-rich-gut-unions
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Two ballot measures for Californians this fall could shape the state&#039;s politics--a millionaire&#039;s tax, or a historic attack on unions&#039; ability to influence campaigns. </div></div></div>
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p><strong>This piece was originally published at <a href="http://labornotes.org/2012/09/dueling-california-measures-set-tax-rich-gut-unions">Labor Notes</a>. </strong></p><p>Californians will vote November 6 whether to approve the largest tax hike on the wealthy in that state since 1978.</p><p>Unions say Proposition 30 is necessary to forestall further deep cuts to education and other public services. The state is already 47th in the nation in expenditures per pupil, and without Prop 30 conditions in the schools will get worse.</p><p>So campaigning hard for Prop 30—TV ads, mailings, door-knocking, phonebanking—would seem to be a no-brainer for unions.</p><p>But this fall’s election season is complicated by the presence of another initiative on the ballot. Prop 32 would make it virtually impossible for unions to play a major role in California politics, by disallowing the use of any money garnered through payroll deductions.</p><p>Why is such money tainted? Well, because that’s how unions do it. The aim of Prop 32 is simply to keep unions out of politics. Almost no corporations collect political funds from employees through payroll withholding.</p><p>Fred Glass of the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) calls the Yes on 32 campaign “astonishingly deceptive.” Its website trumpets, “The politicians are not listening to us. We need to start taking back California by reducing the influence of Special Interests across the board”—including corporate money.</p><p>With language like that, no wonder a mid-July online poll by conservative groups showed Prop 32 with 60 percent in favor and only 29 percent opposed.</p><p>Steve Gilbert, a retired Service Employees Local 1021 activist, says that early on, his local showed pro-32 commercials to members who weren’t familiar with the measure. They liked what they saw.</p><p>Mike Parker, active in local politics in Richmond in the East Bay, says conservatives are cynically “trying to ride the Occupy sentiment to take big money out of politics.”</p><p>Although it would ban direct contributions to candidates, Prop 32 would still allow corporations and unions to support candidates through independent committees—like the Super PACS the Citizens United decision let loose.</p><p>Corporations have proven themselves adept at this game. A preliminary report on 2012 elections in California from the National Institute on Money in State Politics shows business interests spending $127 million and unions $29 million.</p><p>“What they’re counting on is obfuscation,” Glass said. “And they’re counting on the general public’s anti-politician mood,” noting that state legislators poll just 20 percent support.</p><p>Six states in the West and Midwest have passed “paycheck protection” laws, which forbid public employee unions to use dues for political ends without a member’s written consent. Prop 32 goes much further.</p><h3>HISTORY REPEATS</h3><p>California unions have faced such anti-union initiatives before, defeating “paycheck protection” in 1998 and 2005. Unions vastly outspent their opponents to win by 53 percent both times. Prop 32 would make such spending impossible.</p><p>Glass said labor’s opponents learned from those losses, crafting a new message that would appeal to anyone in the 99%.</p><p>“We start off behind because the other side has figured out a way to make this sound good,” he said. “We have an uphill climb—but this gets the labor movement engaged because it threatens its ability to function.”</p><p>“It would be nice if the labor movement got as engaged on proactive issues,” Glass said.</p><h3>TAX THE WEALTHY</h3><p>Which leads us to Proposition 30, which in its first year would bring $6.8 to $9 billion to state coffers, and $6 billion per year after that. The proposal is designed to fend off a projected $6 billion in cuts to schools and colleges.</p><p>The measure squarely targets the 1%, beginning the increase with families that make more than a half million dollars per year. Their income tax rate would jump from 9.3 percent to 10.3 percent, and families making a million would pay 12.3 percent.</p><p>Controversially, the measure would also add a quarter of a percent to the state sales tax, raising it to 7.5 percent. That part of the measure would cost “a penny on a $4 cheeseburger,” as CFT puts it. State sales tax in California is already the highest in the country.</p><p>Some union backers of the tax measure have been less enthusiastic about it since an earlier proposal initiated by the CFT was scuttled.</p><p>The union was promoting a permanent “millionaires tax,” and a grassroots campaign gathered thousands of signatures early this year. When Governor Jerry Brown put forward his own proposal—backed by the state’s largest unions—CFT leaders worked out a compromise rather than have two similar measures on the ballot.</p><p>The compromise, which became Prop 30, limited the income tax hike to seven years and added the four-year sales tax hike, but it also raised taxes on a bigger swath of the wealthy. The threshold was lowered from $1 million to $250,000 for individuals.</p><p>Now Brown is seen as Prop 30’s main proponent, not the unions, and he is decidedly not running a “tax the rich” campaign. He leads with the dire consequences to education if Prop 30 fails, and speaks of the need for government to stay within its means and pay down debt through “shared sacrifice.”</p><h3>TAX MILLIONAIRES</h3><p>Unlike Brown, the CFT is making “tax the rich” the centerpiece of its campaign. Along with the California Nurses, they’ve led creative actions to bring a spotlight on the tax. They put on a skit in front of a yacht club mocking billionaires for worrying about their toys instead of on the state of education in California.</p><p>The tax measure was polling at 55 percent in late August, with 36 percent opposed, possibly fostering complacency. Most private sector unions are focused on defeating Prop 32.</p><p>Michael Sasson, a clerical worker at UC Berkeley and a Teamster, says his union’s Labor Day picnic featured many “No on 32” signs but almost nothing on Prop 30. A memo from the local asked for volunteers against the anti-union measure, but didn’t mention anything else on the ballot.</p><p>“I’m on board against 32,” Sasson said, “but when I talk to my co-workers or to other parents at my daughters’ schools, if we don’t also talk about saving the UC budget and keeping teachers from being laid off, people won’t want to listen.”</p><p>The state AFL-CIO and the 700,000-member SEIU state council are shying away from emphasizing the threat to union rights. Instead, they call Prop 32 the “Special Exemptions Act” and decry its “loopholes” for “corporations, billionaires, and SuperPACs”—not an entirely accurate claim, since unions get the same loophole.</p><p>The state fed’s Steve Smith says the organization is planning the “largest voter mobilization effort we’ve ever had in California,” with up to 40,000 volunteers. Spending will be in the tens of millions of dollars, depending on how much TV the other side buys. Opponents of the last such bill, mostly unions, spent $54 million in 2005.</p><p>Unions enjoy 18 percent density in the state, with 2.7 million members, and the state fed believes it has identified 2.5 million more voters with similar values.</p><p>Smith says high turnout of union and likeminded voters will have a spillover effect favoring the tax measure, whether or not they’ve been talked with about it directly.</p><p>The biggest donors to both the anti-32 and pro-30 campaigns are unions. The California Teachers Association (the NEA affiliate) has given $16 million to fight the paycheck-deduction measure and $1.6 million for the tax fight.</p><p>For the SEIU state council, which has spent $8.2 million on both measures, the disparity runs 3:1.</p><p>Josh Pechthalt, president of the much smaller CFT, predicts that national unions will jump in against Prop 32.</p><p>“California is seen as an exception against the Republican right-wing juggernaut,” he said. “So if this were to pass it would deflate the Democrats and labor and it would have national implications.”</p><p>Martha Kuhl, a nurse and delegate to an East Bay labor council, says the council’s phonebanking has focused on 32. “It would completely flop the entire system on its head and give the big money interests even more power than they currently have,” she said. “Who else speaks up for working people besides unions?"</p><p><strong><em>CRADLE OF CITIZENS UNITED</em></strong></p><p><em>It’s no coincidence that Prop 32’s originators were also behind Citizens United.</em></p><p> </p><p><em>The court case grew out of a film the conservative advocacy group made for showing during the 2008 primaries. Citizens United’s film, “Hillary: The Movie,” was partly funded by the Lincoln Club of Orange County, a group of wealthy businessmen now backing Prop 32.</em></p><p><em>The Clinton-bashing film was explicitly designed as a challenge to the McCain-Feingold election rules that banned the broadcast of ads paid for by corporations during election season. When the Supreme Court majority used the lawsuit to take the reins off corporate spending in politics, the Lincoln Club hailed the decision as a victory for free speech.</em></p><p> </p> Sun, 07 Oct 2012 14:04:00 -0700Jane Slaughter, Labor Notes723120 at http://www.alternet.orgLaborElection 2014LaborNews & Politics700000-member SEIU state councilAmerican Federation of Labor - Congress of Industrial OrganizationsCalifornia Federation of TeachersCalifornia Teachers AssociationcaliforniaEast BayFred Glassgovernorjerry brownJosh Pechthaltlabor dayLincoln Club of Orange CountyMartha KuhlMichael SassonmidwestMike ParkerNational Institute on MoneyNational Instituteorange countyPerson CareerQuotationSEIU state councilSteve GilbertSteve Smithsupreme courtuc berkeleyUN CourtUS Federal ReserveUSDclerical workernurse and delegateonline pollpresidentpublic serviceswealthy businessmenWhat We Learn from Two Strikes at Walmart Warehouseshttp://www.alternet.org/labor/what-we-learn-two-strikes-walmart-warehouses
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">In a time when few union members dare strike, three dozen California workers who move goods for Walmart walked off their jobs September 12. Three days later, 30 Illinois warehouse workers walked out too.</div></div></div>
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p> </p><p><strong>This story was originally published at<a href="http://labornotes.org/2012/09/strikes-expose-hazards-walmarts-supply-chain">Labor Notes.</a></strong></p><p>A strike at Walmart? Two of them. In a time when few union members dare strike, three dozen Southern California workers who move goods for Walmart were desperate enough to walk off their jobs September 12 even without union protection.</p><p>Three days later, 30 workers who’d been organizing with Warehouse Workers for Justice in Elwood, Illinois, southwest of Chicago, walked out, too.</p><p>Both groups of workers had taken legal action against their employers, contractors who move goods for Walmart, and their strikes were protesting illegal retaliation.</p><p>California strikers asked the NLRB to investigate a half dozen unfair labor practices: retaliation against and surveillance of those who’ve been organizing with the energetic <a href="http://labornotes.org/2012/03/supply-chain-workers-test-strength-links">Warehouse Workers United</a> (WWU) worker center, an affiliate of the Change to Win federation, for better conditions.</p><p>Striker David Garcia said, “For a whole week they were making me lift bicycles all day every day just to see if I would quit or give up.” Wearing a WWU T-shirt could mean being sent home early, Garcia said.</p><p>In Illinois, workers for Walmart contractor Roadlink filed suit in federal court September 13 for non-payment of overtime, non-payment for all hours worked, and even pay less than the minimum wage. When they delivered a petition to a Roadlink manager onsite, he immediately fired several of the leaders and threatened everyone else, touching off the strike. One manager tried to drive a big forklift into the crowd of workers.</p><p>The warehouse is still operating but the strike has impacted production. All strikers have been told they are suspended. Their petition to Walmart asked the company to ensure workers are paid for all their hours, with consistent work schedules and safety training and equipment.</p><p>The warehouses outside Chicago are a major portal for goods flowing into retail stores throughout the country, and<a href="http://labornotes.org/2011/10/chicago-warehouse-workers-navigate-maze-contractors-organize">Warehouse Workers for Justice</a>, a worker center connected to the United Electrical Workers union (UE), has been working there since 2009 to support workers in getting their full pay and to fight sexual and racial harassment.</p><p>Strikers delivered a national petition to Walmart corporate offices north of Chicago, with 37,000 signatures supporting the California workers. They got support from striking Chicago teachers September 18 when 150 red-shirted teachers marched with them from a high school to a nearby Walmart store. The group received a police escort to march in the street and then went inside the store for 45 minutes, chanting.</p><p>“The idea,” said UE organizer Leah Fried, “was to link the disturbing labor practices in Walmart warehouses with the Walmart Family Fund, which has invested $1 billion in efforts to privatize public schools.” The Fund gave $3 million to a group, Stand for Children, that successfully lobbied for an <a href="http://labornotes.org/2011/05/billionaires-and-politicians-test-chicago-teachers-union">anti-teacher law</a> in Illinois last year.</p><p>On October 1, the workers plan a big rally at their warehouse with allies from unions, worker centers, and community groups.</p><p><strong>WALMARCH</strong></p><p>The California workers were already planning a “Walmarch” when they hit the dusty pavement outside their warehouse the day before. Warehouse workers, supporters, and former warehouse workers who are injured walked 50 miles from the “Inland Empire,” home to hundreds of warehouses and 85,000 warehouse workers. Their destination was city hall in downtown Los Angeles, a six-day trek.</p><p>Their goal: to win immediate improvements inside the warehouses and to say once again to Walmart that it must take responsibility for the hundreds of thousands of workers in its supply chain.</p><p>Workers took the risk of striking because, having worked in other warehouses, they say conditions at this warehouse are the worst. It’s owned by NFI, a major national player in the growing “third-party logistics” industry.</p><p>Elizabeth Brennan, a WWU staffer, said some union members came to the warehouse to support the workers when they walked out. “Their jaws were on the floor,” she said. Workers say they’ve never seen conditions so bad.</p><p>Over the summer David Garcia, 29, and other workers filed complaints with both CalOSHA, the state health and safety agency, and the National Labor Relations Board. They told CalOSHA, which is investigating, about intense heat and dangerous conditions.</p><p>“There’s no lanes painted so the forklifts don't know where they're driving,” Garcia said. Springs on the ramps that lead to trailer doors are broken, so workers are manually lifting 500 pounds. On a day when it’s 95 degrees outside, he said, “inside the container it’s over 120—and whoever’s receiving merchandise stays in there all day.”</p><p>The warehouse is of the “cross-dock” type—it has a roof but no walls, and workers have no way to keep the billowing dust out of their mouths. The employer charges workers for necessary safety equipment such as reflective vests.</p><p>On the march, Garcia said it was hot walking in the sun, “but not as hot as the warehouse. Here at least we have a breeze. Here we get fresh water.” In the warehouse water comes from a hose, and supervisors discourage workers from refilling their bottles too often.</p><p>Garcia found the marching “a relief. At least we’re not getting yelled at.”</p><p>Despite harassment, Garcia didn’t quit the $8-an-hour job (California’s minimum wage), citing his five children to support. Most workers on his job are Latino immigrants.</p><h3>AFTERMATH</h3><p>The six-day march was an excellent chance, Brennan said, for workers to “leave the desert and interact with all kinds of other people.” Their march was joined by a contingent from the United Farm Workers one day and from OUR Walmart, a group of Walmart store workers, on another. Students, church members, union members, and community groups all walked.</p><p>Best yet, at each meeting held since the march ended, a couple more warehouse workers join the strike and start participating. Last Saturday they connected with a rally by community groups in San Diego opposed to Walmart tearing down a historical building to build a store. Picket lines in front of the warehouse continue. And, said Brennan, “the workers don't seem to be exhausted at all.”</p><h3>THE SUPPLY CHAIN</h3><p>Everything from socks to above-ground swimming pools passes briefly through these workers’ hands on its way to Walmart stores around the country. Huge containers stuffed with goods from Asia are trucked directly from ships docked in the Port of Los Angeles. NFI workers remove the merchandise and push it or forklift it across the dock to waiting tractor trailers, which will take it to Walmart warehouses or stores.</p><p>Walmart hires contractors like NFI, which owns 21 million square feet of warehouse space in the U.S., to run such “transloading” facilities, and those contractors use temp agencies like Warestaff to supply workers like Garcia.</p><p>Will County, Illinois, where the second strike took place, is a key Walmart hub with a similar set-up. In this case, Schneider National, another huge third-party logistics supplier, contracts with Roadlink for the muscle to move Walmart’s goods.</p><h3>WALMART BACKS DOWN</h3><p>Walmart suffered a rare defeat at the hands of workers in its supply chain this summer when eight crawfish peelers in Louisiana walked out after weeks of forced overtime and threats from supervisors.</p><p>Although the eight were on H-2B guestworker visas, which tie an employee to a particular employer, they struck and presented Walmart supplier C.J.’s Seafood with a list of demands, including unpaid wages.</p><p>After the National Guestworker Alliance spearheaded a national petition campaign, highlighting the 24-hour days workers were at times forced to work, Walmart reluctantly severed ties with C.J.’s and the Department of Labor dunned the company $248,000 for back wages and fines.</p><p>The striking warehouse workers aren’t looking for Walmart to dump their contractors but to get the world’s largest retailer to enforce its own “Standards for Suppliers.” Both groups insist that Walmart sets the standards for all warehouse work, nationwide.</p> Sun, 30 Sep 2012 12:20:00 -0700Jane Slaughter, Labor Notes719293 at http://www.alternet.orgLaborLaborlaborunionswalmartstrikestrikesWalkoutTeamster Sympathy Strikes Defeat Lockouthttp://www.alternet.org/story/156109/teamster_sympathy_strikes_defeat_lockout
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">A series of one-day sympathy strikes by Teamsters in five cities helped convince the giant waste-hauler Republic Services to back off a six-week lockout of its workers.</div></div></div>
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A series of one-day sympathy strikes by Teamsters in five cities helped convince the giant waste-hauler Republic Services to back off a six-week lockout of its workers in Evansville, Indiana. The lockout was Republic’s attempt to convince the workers to gut their pensions. In May and June workers in California, Michigan, and Illinois honored picket lines set up by locked-out Indiana workers.</p>
<p>
Republic is the second-largest waste-hauler in the country, after Waste Management, and made profits of $589 million last year. The agreement reached last week suspends both the lockout and the picketing for 30 days, while the parties negotiate whether the company will continue to participate in the jointly run Central States Pension Plan. The plan, which is in bad financial shape, includes Teamsters in 22 states.</p>
<p>
Managers had said they had workers’ interests at heart with their demand to end the defined-benefit pension and replace it with a 401k. They showed their affection May 8 by locking out 80 Teamsters.</p>
<p>
Twenty-two-year employee Scott Williams carried a picket sign in Long Beach, California, the Bay Area, and Champaign, Illinois. The Teamsters adopted the slogan used by striking Memphis sanitation workers in 1968 when they were joined on the line by Martin Luther King, Jr.: “I Am a Man,” or “Soy Hombre” in Spanish, the language of many Republic workers in California.</p>
<p>
Williams says that when he and fellow Indiana workers arrived at an out-of-town location, they visited the worksite with a local union official, to let workers know what Republic was trying to pull and what their rights were.</p>
<p>
They returned the next day—perhaps just two workers—with their picket placards. Everyone stayed out for the day.</p>
<p>
Assistant steward Charlie Ackman of Local 350 in Milpitas, California, says he prepared fellow workers in advance and not one crossed the line, not even Ironworkers and Electrical Workers (IBEW) who were constructing a new recycling center.</p>
<p>
Many Teamster contracts, including Local 215’s in Evansville, include the right not to work behind a picket line. It’s one of the clauses Republic still wants to remove. The international union coordinated information about which Republic locals had these rights and which had expiring contracts.</p>
<p>
Recognizing Republic’s threat to pensions nationwide, a June 13 meeting of locals representing Republic workers voted unanimously to keep up the pressure and to alert municipal customers that sympathy strikes could come to their area.</p>
<p>
“The company knew people were getting together and it wasn't just Central States locals,” said Local 215 President Chuck Whobrey. “The company understood the International was very serious about supporting the locals on this and weren’t going to stand by and let us get picked off one by one.”</p>
<p>
The Teamsters represent 9,000 of the company’s 30,000 full-time employees in North America.</p>
<h3>
PENSION VS. 401K</h3>
<p>
Whobrey has costed out Republic’s initial pension proposal. The company has paid $107 per week into workers’ pension fund, but under the 401k proposal it would pay nothing unless the employee put money in.</p>
<p>
With the lowest-paid workers earning $18.78 an hour, Whobrey feared only a small fraction of his members would agree to deductions. In a 401k, just half the workforce normally participates. “A generation from now, people have absolutely nothing,” he said.</p>
<p>
“Even if you assume 75 percent participated at the maximum level, which is 5 percent of your pay,” Whobrey said, “the company would save $5 million over three years just in Evansville.”</p>
<p>
Williams said he and his union brothers picketed a transfer station where trash is put on larger trucks bound for a landfill, a truck shop, and a recycling center in the Bay Area, with 300-350 workers staying off the job.</p>
<p>
Although Republic is well aware which locations have the right to honor picket lines, and where the union seemed to be preparing, it still had difficulty reacting. Faced with a strike at the garbageman’s starting time of 1 a.m., managers scrambled to bring in the “Blue Crew,” supervisors and non-union workers from other locations.</p>
<p>
The Teamsters said the crew didn’t usually arrive in time to be effective. “The garbage waits,” said Local 350 President Bob Morales. “In the meantime, we’re hoping residents are calling to the company and complaining,” Williams said.</p>
<p>
In Milpitas, Ackman said, management added more overtime to workers’ usual 10-11 hours per day to get the garbage picked up later that week.</p>
<p>
He said it didn’t faze members: “Whenever a union member of any union sees a picket line, it’s his fight.”</p>
<p>
In Evansville, where the Blue Crew was doing locked-out members’ work, the city council had formally asked Republic to end the lockout.</p>
<p>
Scott Williams said members had mixed feelings about returning to work and that he is “not so happy to be back to work without a contract.” Reached yesterday, his first day back, he said the international’s intervention and “the fact that after five weeks we didn’t say yes to the contract” led to the company’s decision to pull back.</p>
<h3>
REPEAT ROLLING STRIKES</h3>
<p>
Sympathy strikes have worked at Republic before. Workers in Mobile, Alabama, struck in March when the company tried to renege on a contract offer. They spread the strike to Buffalo, New York, Columbus, Ohio, and the Seattle area, and ended up reducing their portion of health insurance costs from 30-40 percent down to 25 percent.</p>
<p>
But workers are worried about Republic’s long-term aim at their pensions. Marty Frates, president of Bay Area Local 70, says that if Republic can pull out of the Central States Pension Fund, which includes Evansville, it will come after Teamsters in other funds next.</p>
<p>
Teamsters attended Republic’s May 17 shareholders meeting to oppose a management proposal that the CEO’s heirs get $23 million if he dies in office. They won 41 percent of the vote—despite the fact that Bill Gates owns 17 percent of the shares.</p>
<p>
“I appealed to the shareholders,” Morales said. “How can you in one hand vote more benefits for this guy who makes a multimillion-dollar salary, and tell your poor workers ‘we want to get rid of your pension plan, and give it to this bastard’?”</p>
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<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Jane Slaughter is a staff writer with <a href="http://labornotes.org/">Labor Notes</a>. </div></div></div>
Sun, 01 Jul 2012 12:00:01 -0700Jane Slaughter, Labor Notes671476 at http://www.alternet.orgNews & PoliticsLaborlaborrepublicstrikesteamsterssympathyrollingwinSupply Chain Workers Test Strength of Linkshttp://www.alternet.org/story/154799/supply_chain_workers_test_strength_of_links
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Workers in the nation’s sprawling distribution network hold enormous potential power.</div></div></div>
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p> <strong>This piece was originally published by Labor Notes. Come to the </strong><a target="_blank" href="http://labornotes.org/conference"><strong>Labor Notes conference</strong></a><strong> May 4-6 in Chicago, the biggest gathering of grassroots labor activists and all-around troublemakers out there! </strong><strong>More than 100 workshops and meetings to ‘put the movement back in the labor movement.’ </strong> </p>
<p>Workers in the nation’s sprawling distribution network hold enormous potential power. They bring $622 billion of goods each year from abroad to retail shelves. A work stoppage in any section of the interlinked network—dock workers, railroad workers, truck drivers, warehouse workers, store workers—could shut off the spigot of goods that keep consumers happy and keep profits churning through the supply chain.</p>
<p>In 2002 a 10-day lockout of West Coast dockworkers left a backlog of 200 ships waiting to be unloaded, causing alarmed big-box retailers to beg President Bush to resolve the dispute.</p>
<p>But most workers in the chain belong to no organization that could channel their energy. Their many occupations are fragmented, separated by ethnic and language differences, citizenship status, directly hired workers and temps, employees and “independent contractors,” union and non-union.</p>
<p>Few identify with the catch-all term “logistics worker” that attempts to capture their connections and their shared place in the economy.</p>
<p>In the case of <a href="http://labornotes.org/2011/10/chicago-warehouse-workers-navigate-maze-contractors-organize">warehouse workers</a>, along with retail employees the lowest paid of the bunch, their power is further hidden from them by the instability of their jobs. Organizers believe well over half the workers in three major warehouse hubs work for temporary staffing agencies, with all the lack of transparency that arrangement entails.</p>
<p>Such agencies often pay little above minimum wage, with no benefits and no set schedule. Relentless pressure from the big retailers to lower costs creates these bottom feeders, adding yet another intermediary layer that exempts those retail behemoths from responsibility for workers in their supply chains.</p>
<p>Maria Lopez (a pseudonym) works in a New Jersey factory making Walmart-brand pharmaceuticals. She explains it simply: “Walmart establishes a price, the lowest possible, and then it pressures all the warehouses and factories to lower their prices. Walmart is paying a low salary, and they are getting rich off of us.”</p>
<p><strong>KEY NODES</strong></p>
<p>But against the odds, today warehouse workers are organizing in three crucial hubs: the “Inland Empire” east of Los Angeles, a giant complex southwest of Chicago, and the distribution centers along the New Jersey Turnpike.</p>
<p>The three groups are sharing information and tactics, using a combination of organizing on the shop floor, publicity, demonstrations with allies, and state enforcement of wage-and-hour and health-and-safety laws. They acknowledge they are unlikely to get far with traditional NLRB elections shop by shop, yet maintain a focus on workers’ immediate issues on the ground, which means close attention to individual workplaces.</p>
<p>There are 100,000 warehouse workers in the Inland Empire, where<a href="http://www.warehouseworkersunited.org/">Warehouse Workers United</a>, backed by Change to Win, has campaigned for three years. Originally designed to blitz the industry following passage of the abandoned Employee Free Choice Act, the drive is now targeting workers whose ultimate controller is Walmart.</p>
<p>Linked to the Food and Commercial Workers’ (UFCW) campaign against the mega-retailer, the goal is to push Walmart to enforce good behavior on the employers in its supply chain.</p>
<p>Says director Nick Allen, “There is no path without beating Walmart.”</p>
<p>Walmart is five times larger than Kroger, the next largest retailer in the U.S., and nearly six times bigger than Target, its closest competitor in non-food retail.</p>
<p>Mark Meinster organizes with <a href="http://www.warehouseworker.org/">Warehouse Workers for Justice</a>, a United Electrical Workers (UE) affiliate, near Chicago. He notes that Walmart sets the conditions: one of its Chicago-area warehouses pioneered paying workers by the piece instead of hourly.</p>
<p>Other employers picked up the practice, which makes workers wait for containers to arrive and often leaves them with less than minimum wage. “Any effort to improve conditions for warehouse workers has to be centered on Walmart,” Meinster said.</p>
<p>The strategy is to organize workers on the lowest rungs of the Walmart ladder at the same time that allies such as Jobs with Justice and OUR Walmart, the organization of store workers backed by UFCW, are pressuring the company.</p>
<p>The allies are challenging bad working conditions at the stores, while community coalitions are loudly denouncing Walmart’s attempts to bring its low-road labor practices to new cities, where the company badly needs to expand to shore up sales.</p>
<p>“Shaming alone would not deliver any results,” Allen says, “but shaming in combination with a robust campaign of organized workers could cause the company to look hard at its own business model.”</p>
<p>Pointing to unionized Walmart stores in Europe, Latin America, and Asia, Allen thinks the company is pragmatic. If U.S. workers and allies can put on a campaign that “shows labor is not going away,” Walmart could “make adjustments.” His aim is to create a situation where Walmart’s choice is “we can keep waging these wars, or enough already.”</p>
<p><strong>TRICOASTAL SOLIDARITY</strong></p>
<p>Last October the three groups of warehouse workers met via videoconference to share stories and solidarity, speaking in Spanish and English. All belong to membership organizations with monthly dues of $5 or $10. WWU uses the old-time card system, where the member’s card is punched when she pays up.</p>
<p>All have lawyers to help with legal claims but put a premium on getting workers to take visible action against their employers. Santos Castaneda, 25, tells about the Chino, California, warehouse where he’s worked as a temp for three-and-a-half years, moving shoes and clothes for Walmart.</p>
<p>His warehouse was a dirty mess, with unmaintained forklifts and temperatures at 115 degrees inside the containers workers unloaded. “They never gave us any training how to operate a forklift or how to work safely,” Castaneda said. “Pallets were always tilting over, and the pressure from supervisors was bad.”</p>
<p>WWU organizers trained Castaneda how to file a complaint with Cal-OSHA—which got him fired.</p>
<p>But WWU put a petition online that garnered more than 3,000 signatures, and two days later organized a delegation to management, bringing supporters from Service Employees Local 721. “A couple hours later they were calling me back to go to work,” Castaneda said.</p>
<p>Workers got new forklifts, safety mirrors in the aisles, a clean warehouse, and water to drink. Castaneda particularly likes the respect: “They know we’re involved with Warehouse Workers United so they don’t mess with us.”</p>
<p><strong>WORKERS’ COUNCILS</strong></p>
<p>Along the New Jersey Turnpike, an 11-year-old worker center called <a href="http://newlabor.org/">New Labor</a> has built <i>consejos</i>, or workers’ councils, in three cities with high densities of temp agencies. Workers are trained in identifying violations and in recruiting co-workers.</p>
<p>Juan Rojas explains that the consejos are open to any worker, with biweekly meetings. “Someone can present a problem in their workplace,” he said, “and together we look for a way to respond.”</p>
<p>New Labor convinced the temp agency On Target to sign a memorandum of understanding that recognizes New Labor as a party. On Target was requiring workers to use—and pay dearly for—its company vans to get to work, even if they had their own transportation. The memo establishes a time frame to end the practice.</p>
<p>The worker center focuses on Walmart but maintains its openness to all. “These aren’t Walmart workers,” said Director Marien Casillas of the On Target workforce. “But we want to illustrate to the consejos that it’s possible to get an agreement.”</p>
<p><strong>ECLIPSED</strong></p>
<p>In Will County, Illinois, workers have made an issue of enforcing Walmart’s official policy, which requires its suppliers to follow the law. They demonstrated at the new downtown Walmart in Chicago in February, demanding that the company enforce its policy at Eclipse Advantage, a staffing agency that ended contracts for 100 workers without warning.</p>
<p>The Chicago-area warehouse workforce is 40 percent Latino, 40 percent Black, and 20 percent white. Twice a year WWJ gathers volunteers from among UE members to go door to door to recruit in neighborhoods.</p>
<p>Some of those fired Eclipse workers, who worked at a three-million-square-foot Walmart warehouse, had filed wage and hour complaints with the state—making the firings illegal retaliation, they say. Their piece-rate system often resulted in wages way below the legal minimum. One worker brought in a pay stub showing $57.81 for 12.5 hours of work.</p>
<p>Leticia Rodriguez, who was among those fired December 29, explains, “Workers were paid by the truck, but there is no way anyone could unload a truck full of 430 trampolines in three hours.”</p>
<p>Now workers have filed a WARN Act lawsuit as well, claiming they did not receive the required 60 days’ notice of a mass layoff.</p>
<p>Said Rodriguez of her involvement with WWJ, “I learned rights I didn’t know I had.”</p>
<p>Looking at the logistics industry, it would be easy to see Goliath facing a David who’s just realizing he has cousins in the assembling crowd.</p>
<p>Longshore and rail workers belong to unions, but most truckers, retail workers, and warehouse workers do not. No one is expecting the Teamsters to re-organize the freight industry soon, nor the warehouse workers to win contracts with Walmart.</p>
<p>Still, organizers can see how solidarity could flourish. Meinster says logistics workers have tremendous potential power because retailers compete on the basis of how efficient their supply chains are.</p>
<p>Pulling that supply chain taut puts power in the hands of the workers who move the goods. “Workers who are so important to the success of these companies ought to be paid accordingly,” he says.</p>
<p>There have been small steps toward bridging the divides. In 2010 the UE organized low-paid van drivers who shuttle Chicago-area rail workers from yard to yard. During a contract campaign last year workers and organizers talked up van driver issues at railroad workers’ union meetings.</p>
<p>Rail crews signed petitions and postcards to management calling for a living wage for the van drivers and to take concession demands off the table. Leaders from Locomotive Engineers locals in Illinois and Iowa attended negotiations in support of the drivers.</p>
<p>What might it take to unravel the thorny knots separating workers from each other? Peter Olney, an organizer with the Longshore Union (ILWU), says warehouse workers need their own “pervasive ground game coupled with leverage from trucking and the docks.” He notes the huge disparity between high-paid and well-organized ILWU members moving freight, and, 45 miles inland from West Coast docks, “people doing the same work at minimum wage with no benefits.”</p>
<p>Many of the ILWU’s big multinational ocean-carrier employers own subsidiaries that run warehouses. Olney likes to envision an ILWU contract expiration when warehouse workers at the subsidiaries could rowdily demand union recognition while ILWU members on the docks insisted on the same for their brothers and sisters.</p>
<p>After all, logistics workers in established unions have felt their employers’ aggression too: rail workers, dockers, and especially truckers, who’ve seen the union share of the freight industry fall from a strong majority in the 1970s to less than a quarter today.</p>
<p>“Warehouse workers have to organize on their own terms,” Meinster says. “Once they’re ready they will reach out to workers throughout the chain and we’re hopeful we’ll find that support.”</p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Jane Slaughter is a staff writer with <a href="http://labornotes.org/">Labor Notes</a>. </div></div></div>
Mon, 02 Apr 2012 05:00:01 -0700Jane Slaughter, Labor Notes670154 at http://www.alternet.orgNews & PoliticsLaborlaborworkstrikedistributionwarehousesupplyMichigan Workers Fight Emergency Managers, Plan Constitutional Amendment to Protect Union Rightshttp://www.alternet.org/story/154306/michigan_workers_fight_emergency_managers%2C_plan_constitutional_amendment_to_protect_union_rights
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Getting out in front of the spreading attacks on workers, Michigan unions plan a constitutional amendment to ban further encroachment on collective bargaining rights.</div></div></div>
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p><strong>This piece was originally published by Labor Notes. Come to the</strong><a target="_blank" href="http://labornotes.org/conference"><strong>Labor Notes conference</strong></a><strong>May 4-6 in Chicago, the biggest gathering of grassroots labor activists and all-around troublemakers out there! Don’t miss a weekend of education, agitation, and inspiration.</strong></p>
<p>Governor Mitch Daniels received a bouquet of roses after he signed Indiana’s right-to-work law in February—not from U.S. Steel or Subaru or other grateful Indiana employers, but from an ambitious Republican in next-door Michigan.</p>
<div class="content"><p>State Representative Michael Shirkey said he wanted to thank Daniels for setting the bar high, while promoting his own drive for right to work.</p>
<p>Though no credible research backs him, Shirkey claims Indiana now has the edge in attracting investment, so he wants to “eliminate [the union shop] as an obstacle and level the playing field.” Michigan’s workforce is 16.5 percent unionized.</p>
<p>Although Republican Michigan Governor Rick Snyder says he’s not interested in pushing right to work, unionists note Daniels said the same thing before reversing course this year. As in Indiana, Republicans control both houses of the Michigan legislature.</p>
<p><strong>Amend to Defend</strong></p>
<p>Michigan’s top union leaders are meeting behind closed doors to decide whether to take on the huge fight it would require to amend the state constitution to block right to work, with a ballot initiative this November.</p>
<p>Al Garrett, head of statewide AFSCME Council 25, said the amendment would prohibit the legislature from crafting new laws that infringe on collective bargaining rights in the private or public sectors. Language is under discussion.</p>
<p>United Auto Workers (UAW) President Bob King surprised Detroit community activists February 2 when he revealed the plan at a small forum. Some audience members had been active in gathering signatures to put a different issue, the state’s emergency manager law, on the November ballot.</p>
<p>Passed last year over heated objections from unions, that law allows Snyder to appoint overseers for cities or school districts operating in the red. They have the power to cancel union contracts, sell off local assets, and remove elected local officials.</p>
<p>In Wisconsin, unions were instrumental in gathering more than a million signatures to recall the anti-union governor. In Ohio, they did the same to repeal an anti-collective bargaining law.</p>
<p>When an audience member asked why Michigan unions have not wholeheartedly backed the petition to repeal the emergency manager law, King said leaders thought amending the constitution was a better, more permanent strategy. A constitutional amendment would block both right to work and emergency managers, he said. The measure does not have to pass the legislature.</p>
<p><strong>Finally Enough</strong></p>
<p>Community organizations, churches, and some union locals struggled to collect signatures to put repeal of the manager law on the fall ballot, finally announcing February 13 that they had reached the threshold.</p>
<p>Under Michigan law, once 162,000 signatures are certified, the law is suspended until voters have their say. Opponents had wanted to get the law on hold last fall, before more cities could fall under the ax. Detroit is currently under state officials’ review.</p>
<p>Ray Holman, legislative liaison for a UAW local representing 17,000 state employees, said, “Some of us have been collecting as individual citizens, not because the union told us to.”</p>
<p><strong>Anti-Democratic </strong></p>
<p>Opponents decry the emergency managers as an infringement on democratic rights and note that all the jurisdictions now operating under them are majority African American. The manager in Detroit’s school district, a former GM executive, is closing and charterizing schools left and right.</p>
<p>King pointed out that even if the original manager law is suspended, the legislature could quickly pass another, similar one—which legislators have, in fact, threatened to do.</p>
<p>Community leaders at the forum, including Maureen Taylor of Michigan Welfare Rights, sharply questioned King as to how they were supposed to work together to defeat a common enemy if unions made decisions without involving or informing community allies.</p>
<p>Union decision-makers have not reached agreement themselves, however. King said an amendment campaign would cost $15-$20 million, leading some leaders to balk at the cost.</p>
<p>It would require 322,609 signatures to put an amendment on the ballot.</p>
<p>John Philo, whose Sugar Law Center in Detroit helped file suit against the emergency manager law, said state Democrats may be leery of a constitutional amendment campaign, fearing it would “bring in a lot of money from the other side.”</p>
<p>Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has raised $12.2 million, most of it from right-wing sources out of state, to defend against his recall.</p>
<p><strong>Emergency Threats</strong></p>
<p>Meanwhile, Michigan city officials are getting some of what an emergency manager would seek simply by using the threat. In February Detroit unions reached tentative deals to open their contracts again and take concessions, such as ending defined-benefit pensions for new hires. Talk has swirled of selling off city assets, including the Frederick Law Olmstead-designed Belle Isle, an island park in the Detroit River.</p>
<p>Holman points out that some Republicans in the legislature are already attempting to achieve right to work through other means. A House committee recently reported out a bill that would force unions to ask members to reauthorize dues every year. Last year a bill to institute right to work for teachers was promoted but died.</p>
<p>Shirkey, the Republican legislator, says Snyder doesn’t want a repeat of the protests in Wisconsin. But if right to work passes the House, Holman said, “that could create momentum that would change Governor Snyder’s calculations.” </p>
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<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Jane Slaughter is a staff writer with <a href="http://labornotes.org/">Labor Notes</a>. </div></div></div>
Sun, 26 Feb 2012 08:00:01 -0800Jane Slaughter, Labor Notes669760 at http://www.alternet.orgNews & PoliticsNews & PoliticsLaborActivismlabororganizingunionsmichiganemergencymanagersAmerican Workers Versus the Tea Partieshttp://www.alternet.org/story/148360/american_workers_versus_the_tea_parties
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Can organized labor out-organize the tea parties?</div></div></div>
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>As tens of thousands of activists rally in Washington October 2, not all union members will be on the same page. No one knows how many unionists attended Glenn Beck’s “Restore Honor” gathering last month—they were surely a small minority—but the national political climate has opened some to the message of over-taxation, government-bashing, and fear of foreigners.</p>
<p>After all, even before the Tea Party came on the scene, 30-40 percent of union members were consistently voting Republican, according to many polls. And a CBS poll this month says 19 percent of Americans call themselves Tea Party supporters, though they may never have gone to a rally or visited a Tea Party website.</p>
<p>Even if most unionists see the Tea Party as the enemy, some express grudging admiration for aspects of it. Joe Cardona, a vice president of a Detroit UAW local, went with other auto workers to a Tea Party in the suburbs and though they weren’t welcome, tried to talk to people there.</p>
<p>“I don’t like that they run with that hate-mongering type of agenda,” he said, “but I respect that Tea Party people are fed up. That’s what’s hurt labor, we’ve been complacent for so long: ‘you can fix things by voting for the right candidate.’ I’m with them on holding these politicians accountable.”</p>
<h3>A CHANCE FOR A SAY?</h3>
<p>Although big money fuels the Tea Party, from billionaire libertarians to FOX News, it’s not simply a front for big business. Its lack of structure allows political greenhorns to take the ball and run with it, creating groups that are locally owned, act independently, and aren’t afraid to challenge the status quo—even if their ideas about what’s off-track and how to solve it are wrong.</p>
<p>With the economy a mess and neither Democrats nor Republicans producing a solution, the field is open for folks who say the whole system is broken. The Tea Party taps into many people’s very real sense of both insecurity and urgency. The movement dares to say that our problems are enormous, not fixable with Band-aids. An “analysis” that claims to explain the whole ball of wax (like Glenn Beck’s blackboards) is attractive, especially when the only other solution people hear is “vote for me.”</p>
<p>“When you don’t have a solution you start to make up stuff to try to explain it, and you fall prey to these guys who pretend to know what they’re talking about,” says Frank Halstead, a Teamsters for a Democratic Union warehouse worker in Los Angeles.</p>
<p>Bill Fletcher of the Center for Labor Renewal, who authored an economics education package for the AFL-CIO in the 1990s, says that because the union movement has not confronted racism seriously nor talked about how capitalism works, that failure leaves some members receptive to other explanations of their problems.</p>
<p>Thus the Tea Party mines economic insecurity and fading hopes for a better future—promising a return to a mythical past of American pride, honor, and prosperity.</p>
<h3>NO PLACE FOR US</h3>
<p>Besides, ordinary people know—either intellectually or in their gut—that they don't really count in the political system. It was a bilateral consensus, after all, that bailed out the bankers—and may soon cut Social Security benefits, too. The Tea Party feels like something they can get involved in and have a say.</p>
<p>And underlying all the insecurity is America’s age-old plague, racism, always available to help “explain” the world by blaming Blacks or immigrants or Muslims.</p>
<p>Michael Scarver, the Steelworkers’ PAC coordinator, is clear that when Tea Partyers say “we want our America back,” they are reacting to a Black man in the White House. A CBS poll showed 52 percent of Tea Party supporters believe too much has been made of the problems facing Black people—compared to 28 percent of the overall population. The poll also said 89 percent of Tea Party adherents are white.</p>
<p>In 2008 union leaders were forced out of their comfort zone and into talking frankly about race with their members. They argued that Obama’s race was a terrible reason not to vote for him, as Rich Trumka put it. But after the victory, the impulse to change the subject as quickly as possible made this openness short-lived.</p>
<p>Within a year, Obama’s promises to union members lay in tatters: no labor law reform, no public option in the health care bill, no real green jobs program. With unemployment at 10 percent, and a constant drumbeat of fear and hate in the media, the door was open to alternative explanations for who’s to blame.</p>
<h3>TALKING ABOUT TEA</h3>
<p>How are unions addressing the Tea Party’s appeal?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Mostly by putting out their own message, “having conversations about the facts,” as the USW’s Scarver puts it. Though he’s taken members on around every topic from taxes to guns, many union leaders are nervous about conservatism among the rank and file and don’t call out their ideas directly. They tend to think unity is built by focusing on unions’ core mission of wages and working conditions, avoiding areas of disagreement.</p>
<p>Fletcher says he sometimes sees a “deer in headlights” reaction to challenges like the Tea Party. Moreover, not knowing how to respond to the Tea Party is the flip side of not knowing how to push Obama. With some exceptions, he says, we’ve seen little union pressure on the administration or other Democrats.</p>
<p>AFL-CIO leaders are now beginning to challenge the Tea Party by name. In a late August speech in Alaska, AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka asked, “What is this crazy magnet that's pulling people to the right?” and criticized Sarah Palin for “getting close to calling for violence.”</p>
<p>Answering members’ questions in a web chat, federation Secretary-Treasurer Arlene Holt Baker said the Tea Party “promotes hate over hope” and tries to “divide us in a way that makes us forget about our economic interests.”</p>
<p>Jeff Crosby, an IUE-CWA local president in Massachusetts, wants leaders to take on members’ wrongheaded views and prejudices.</p>
<p>“If it’s a choice between fearing Muslims and Mexicans or the corporate guys, we’ve got to be more blunt about it,” Crosby said.</p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Jane Slaughter is a staff writer with <a href="http://labornotes.org/">Labor Notes</a>. Mark Brenner is the Director of Labor Notes. </div></div></div>
Thu, 30 Sep 2010 07:00:01 -0700Jane Slaughter, Mark Brenner, Labor Notes663756 at http://www.alternet.orgEconomyEconomyCivil LibertiesTea Party and the RightLaborlabortea partyone americaUnion Victory in California Desert -- Workers Beat Back Most of Rio Tinto's Demandshttp://www.alternet.org/story/146885/union_victory_in_california_desert_--_workers_beat_back_most_of_rio_tinto%27s_demands
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Workers agree to a tentative deal to end a 15-week lockout against the world&#039;s 4th-largest mining company.</div></div></div>
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>Miners in Boron, California, vote Saturday on a tentative agreement to end their 15-week lockout. The Longshore and Warehouse Union says the pact beats back most of the demands made by Rio Tinto, the world’s fourth-largest mining company.</p>
<p>Rio Tinto had demanded the right to convert full-time jobs to part-time, gut seniority, cut pay at any time, and outsource. The six-year agreement calls for annual 2.5 percent wage increases but takes a step backward on pensions: new hires will receive 401(k)s.</p>
<p>Workers credited the victory to the outpouring of support both from their own small town in the High Desert of Southern California and from Los Angeles, 125 miles away, as well as throughout the ILWU.</p>
<p>The Boron miners received a Troublemakers Award at the April 23-25 Labor Notes Conference, which honors some of the most outstanding (and often unsung) grassroots activists in the labor movement.</p>
<p>“The biggest lesson we learned,” said instrumentation electrician Mike Davenport, “is that it’s not enough to be union for one day, to get the contract. You’ve got to reach out to others who’ve supported you. People were driving 100+ miles to support us; we have to do the same.”</p>
<p>Four factors contributed to the win:</p>
<ul><li>community and labor movement support. Tons of food were delivered from the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and others. The ILWU had doctors volunteer for a free clinic. The local credit union—the only financial institution in Boron—let workers slide for three months on house and car notes, said rank and filer Kevin Martz.</li>
<br /><li>the union’s pressure, with allies, on Rio Tinto around the world. Protesters dogged company executives from Boston to London to Australia.</li>
<br /><li>poor production by scabs. “They admitted less than a month ago they were on their third group of scabs,” said Martz. Much of the workforce is highly skilled and familiar with the operation, coming from generations of mining families.</li>
<br /><li>political pressure that stopped a federal handout of tribal lands in Arizona to Rio Tinto for copper mining.</li>
</ul><p>Rio Tinto spent thousands of dollars trying to convince the people of Boron that their neighbors were backward and greedy, but the company’s ads didn’t resonate. The ILWU was able to show that this was a David v. Goliath struggle of workers and families against a multinational conglomerate seeking to starve workers into submission to a workplace without rights.</p>
<p>“Rio Tinto has gotten a lot of negative press and they want to reverse their public image,” Martz said.</p>
<p>Said rank-and-filer Kim Evans, “When we first got locked out I thought there was no way in heck we would win this. But we had so many people that showed up out here. I grew up out here, but for other people it’s a shock—a little tiny desert town that looks like it would blow away… The Teamsters brought us $30,000 worth of groceries and then another $20,000, so we had a food bank.”</p>
<p>Martz praised supporters for help in paying COBRAs, utilities, mortgages, and car payments, and noted the tremendous support from the community.</p>
<p>“When people view your struggle as righteous,” added ILWU organizing director Peter Olney, “it’s a lot easier.”</p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Jane Slaughter is a staff writer with <a href="http://labornotes.org/">Labor Notes</a>. </div></div></div>
Fri, 14 May 2010 21:00:01 -0700Jane Slaughter, Labor Notes662237 at http://www.alternet.orgEconomyEconomyunionworkersboronrio tintoilwusettlementLabor Against the War Shifting Sights to Afghanistan Occupationhttp://www.alternet.org/story/144000/labor_against_the_war_shifting_sights_to_afghanistan_occupation
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Because of domestic issues like health care reform, many unions have remained silent about Afghanistan. That&#039;s about to change.</div></div></div>
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>U.S. Labor Against the War is preparing for its third national assembly in December as the original motivation for its founding --the Iraq war -- is winding down to a more limited but permanent presence. No worries that the nearly seven-year-old USLAW coalition has outlived its usefulness, though: delegates to the Chicago meeting will debate the Afghanistan war.</p>
<p>Thus far few unions have taken positions on the increasingly unpopular U.S. presence there, even those that have historically been leaders within labor on questions of war and peace.</p>
<p>An example is SEIU1199, United Healthcare Workers East, which in 2003 sent 25 busloads of members to Washington to try to forestall the invasion of Iraq. Vice President Steve Kramer says war has not been on 1199’s front burner recently. "We’re not focused on world issues to the extent we’d like to be," Kramer said, citing concessions demands, a slew of contract reopeners, and the health care reform fight.</p>
<p>Besides preoccupation with day-to-day survival, some union leaders may be hesitant to criticize the U.S. presence in Afghanistan for other reasons. Kathy Black of AFSCME District Council 47 in Philadelphia says, "Nobody knows squat about Afghanistan, which is why USLAW has slide shows and fact sheets." <script src="http://www.labornotes.org/sites/default/modules/ad/serve.php?q=1&amp;t=&amp;u=node%2F2515" type="text/javascript"></script><!-- No active ads were found in 0 -->Black, a USLAW co-convenor, sees a change in attitude since President Obama was elected.</p>
<p>"It’s been really simple as long as Bush was president to get a lot of these unions to oppose the obscene level of spending in Iraq," Black said. "But anything that will smack of opposing Obama’s policies or saying he’s not withdrawing from Iraq fast enough -- they have other fish to fry."</p>
<p>Kramer noted also the general lack of anti-war protests in the country.</p>
<p>Black sees a "hesitancy to do anything to discredit the administration" during the fight to get health care and labor law reform.</p>
<p>"If we get sold out on those things," she says, "it’ll be easier to get people to sign on [to an anti-war position]."</p>
<h3>DEBATE IT AT HOME</h3>
<p>USLAW leaders have sent out sample union resolutions in advance of the December meeting, asking affiliates to raise and debate the question in their own meetings.</p>
<p>One such resolution, from a big New York Teachers (AFT) local, United University Professions, says, "The $65 billion to be spent in Afghanistan this year, and the hundreds of billions of dollars required in coming years for counterinsurgency there, are desperately needed for urgent domestic social purposes."</p>
<p>A USLAW slide show is chock full of eye-opening statistics that affiliates are encouraged to share with members: The money spent in Iraq and Afghanistan could have paid for a year’s worth of health care for 140 million people -- almost every working person in the U.S. The wars have cost each U.S. family $12,750 so far.</p>
<p>John Braxton is co-president of the wall-to-wall Faculty and Staff Federation at the Community College of Philadelphia, AFT Local 2026, an affiliate of USLAW. He says that when some members opposed the local’s taking a stand against the impending Iraq war in late 2002, leaders took a membership poll. They found 60 percent supported the local’s position.</p>
<p>Afghanistan is trickier, Braxton believes. USLAW was formed after many official union bodies had begun to oppose the war, he notes, and was created to pull those unions together and expand their reach within labor.</p>
<p>But now, Braxton says, most locals don’t have any position at all. "We won’t be a very effective organization if it’s just the activists saying we’re against this war," he said.</p>
<h3>TALKING GUNS V. BUTTER</h3>
<p>Given the enormous cost of war and the huge cutbacks this year in government spending on education, health care, and other public goods, it’s natural that some unions are educating members and the public on the trade-offs.</p>
<p>SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania, for example, trains staffers on how to engage members on the "guns or butter" question, stressing that this is a union issue and shouldn’t be shied away from.</p>
<p>In July, when Pennsylvania failed to pass a state budget on time, some SEIU Healthcare members faced payless paydays. The union focused its protests on the impact of budget cuts on state-run veterans nursing homes, where nurses are SEIU members. The union said the cuts would close 400 beds and that the vet homes had already turned down 40 vets who needed a bed.</p>
<p>"Pennsylvania is experiencing the largest call-up of reserves in many years," said local President Neal Bisno. "Every community is experiencing the impact of expansion of military action abroad."</p>
<p>A day of action featured press conferences at five nursing homes, along with vets’ organizations. The legislature reversed the cuts.</p>
<h3>HEARING FROM A VET</h3>
<p>Last year, the local’s annual convention featured a march and rally at a VA clinic and talks by a member, a Pittsburgh nurse, and her son who had come back from Iraq with physical and psychological problems.</p>
<p>"His story touched a nerve with our members -- the idea that we’re spending the kinds of resources we are on dubious military operations in Iraq,” Bisno said, “yet we can’t provide basic access to affordable health care for adults and children in the U.S., even those we’re sending abroad."</p>
<p>Mike Zweig of United University Professions, which represents faculty and professional staff at the State University of New York, says his delegate assembly passed an anti-Afghan war resolution this month by a big majority.</p>
<p>The SUNY system just made a mid-year budget cut of $90 million, Zweig said, and "people are just disgusted with this war, they want the money. Nobody said a word about ‘let’s cool it till after we get health care reform.’"</p>
<p>Two recent national polls show only 40 percent and 52 percent of Americans supporting the Afghan war. Kathy Black believes union members’ opposition to the eight-year-old conflict is bound to grow.</p>
<p>"We can’t escape the reality of the money situation," Black says. "As long as we are pouring money into overseas military operations we can’t possibly have full economic recovery. We have an opening to talk about war spending and the black hole of Afghanistan."</p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Jane Slaughter is a staff writer with <a href="http://labornotes.org/">Labor Notes</a>. </div></div></div>
Mon, 23 Nov 2009 06:00:01 -0800Jane Slaughter, Labor Notes659502 at http://www.alternet.orgEconomyWorldEconomyafghanistanunionsseiuWorkplace Harassment: The Recession's Hidden Byproducthttp://www.alternet.org/story/141608/workplace_harassment%3A_the_recession%27s_hidden_byproduct
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">In the face of a tough economy, many employees are suffering from mistreatment.</div></div></div>
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>The recession numbers focus on the out of work, the nearly 10 percent of the workforce who are unemployed. Not counted in the stats of workplace misery are those still “lucky to have a job.”</p>
<p>A <i>Labor Notes</i> survey this month found harassment in the workplace at unprecedented levels, with a sharp uptick since the recession began. It may be that a measurable chunk of the unemployed have been harassed out of their jobs, fired rather than laid off.</p>
<p>Union members report increases in verbal abuse, discipline including discharge, crackdowns on attendance, surveillance, hassling to work faster, forced overtime, and a concerted effort to get rid of older workers. “It’s at a level that I have not seen equaled in my 20 years with the company,” said Seattle UPS driver Dan Scott.</p>
<p>As a rule recessions are a time for management to bear down in all sorts of ways, as the order to do more with less comes down the supervisory food chain.</p>
<p>Now, unions may be less prepared than ever to resist the harassment. In previous rounds of concessions, many surrendered work rules that had given workers flexibility or some say over their work day. Some took two-tier contracts that diluted solidarity on the job. And many older workers who knew—and defended—a less onerous workplace are gone.</p>
<p>Mark Bass, president of a Longshoremen’s local in Mobile, Alabama, said foremen are rushing dock workers and blackballing those who don’t speed up.</p>
<p>“It has not always been this way,” Bass added. “We had a large group of longshoremen retire who knew the longshoreman industry and had the union at heart. Now with the newcomers that don’t know the history and the story that goes from one to the other, we are faced with the challenge of educating our people.”</p>
<p>A recession is a hard time to do that. “At least I’ve got a job,” many say. And union leaders feel pressed to save jobs, not job standards. Still, some locals are hearing members’ desire for day-to-day respect.</p>
<h3>BROWN DOG BITES</h3>
<p>UPS made its plans for the recession clear with a video shown to workers late last year. CEO Scott Davis warned that companies come out of a recession three ways: weakened, not at all, or leaner and stronger. UPS bosses—long expert at micromanagement—intend to take the third path.</p>
<p>Scott, the Seattle driver, said managers are putting on the brown uniform and riding along with drivers in record numbers. From an average of three or four rides per month, he says, they’ve increased to that many per week. They choose perfectly sorted trucks, open doors for drivers, walk really fast—everything to speed up on measurement day.</p>
<p>“You have to fight the urge to walk as fast as they’re walking. If I had a nickel for every time he said, ‘let’s go, let’s move it,’” Scott said. “It’s perpetual chatter the whole day.”</p>
<p>If the numbers at the end of a ride day are higher than on a regular day, that’s proof the worker has been “stealing time.”</p>
<p>UPS made $400 million in the first quarter of this year, despite recession blues. Telecommunications giant AT&amp;T is even better off, pulling down $12.9 billion in 2008. But once the AT&amp;T contract expired April 4, says Dan Coffin, a business agent with Communications Workers Local 1298 in Connecticut, suspensions skyrocketed.</p>
<p>Because AT&amp;T has a two-tier contract, management is intent on getting rid of first-tier workers. Walt Cole is a case in point. He and other Local 1298 installers were transferred temporarily to U-Verse, which installs TV and Internet lines. They brought their higher pay and contract rights with them.</p>
<p>“Management hated paying us $30 an hour,” said Cole. “We had things to say about work rules being violated, we filed grievances, we were a thorn in their side.”</p>
<p>When Cole exercised his contractual right not to work on his day off—a right not shared by the U-Verse second-tier workers—he was suspended. When he ducked into a restaurant for carry-out and forgot to lock his truck, he was put on final warning for a year—despite a 10-year record of no discipline. Now he’s fired.“When the contract expired,” Cole said, “you could almost see them rubbing their hands and saying, ‘This is the time to get rid of people.’”</p>
<h3>SICK AND TIRED</h3>
<p>Hospital workers, too, report that penalties are ratcheting up, with suspensions substituting for progressive discipline. A punitive approach to medication or practice errors has employees fearing for their jobs—and could pressure workers to cover up mistakes rather than report them.</p>
<p>Judy Sheridan-Gonzalez, a nurse at Montefiore Medical Center in New York, says nurses are harassed to punch out and finish their paperwork off the clock or to work through their meal breaks to finish on time.</p>
<p>At the University of Chicago Medical Center, the endowment took a hit from the stock market crash, and the president decided on 9 percent cuts to come through the recession leaner. Layoffs mean blue-collar and clerical workers are working short-handed and lunches are denied, according to Teamsters Local 743 rep J Burger.</p>
<p>Workers are bumping into new jobs where they’re pressured to be up to speed within 30 days. Burger said many find the environment “so nasty and hostile they said they were leaving.” The local managed to negotiate severance pay.</p>
<p>At the same time management created a new non-union position, “advanced pharmacy tech,” that does bargaining unit work. “They’re using them to snitch on people,” said Burger. “We’ve gone from one or two grievances every two months to 15 outstanding.”</p>
<h3>GET THE OLD GUY</h3>
<p>At the L’Oreal hair dye factory in New Jersey, chemical compounder Tom Walsh says management is targeting older workers to discipline and then fire. As a part-time business agent for RWDSU-UFCW Local 262, Walsh sees a similar crackdown across the wide variety of workplaces he represents.</p>
<p>“They write them up for every little thing, it doesn’t matter how minor, and then it progresses to the next step till they’ve got their foot out the door,” Walsh said.</p>
<p>Scott, the UPS steward, said each of the four drivers he represented in management reviews in two months’ time has had more than 20 years.</p>
<p>At other UFCW-represented companies, workers on sick leave for more than 13 weeks are fired. Walsh notes that lower managers are not immune: “They got rid of pretty much anybody over the age of 40 and brought in a bunch of young kids right out of college.”</p>
<h3>NO ROLLING OVER</h3>
<p>Some CWA locals at AT&amp;T are using the fact that their contract is expired to take action against harassment. In Northern California, when two members of Local 9404 were disciplined for refusing overtime, the local called a grievance strike.</p>
<p>Overtime work isn’t required, after a 2001 agreement stripped it from the contract. “We had to defend that,” said President Carol Whichard, who remembers hating year after year of forced overtime as a technician in the field.</p>
<p>Whichard called the strike at 8:30 a.m., and by 10 a.m., 600 workers had driven their vehicles back to the garages and were holding picket signs. By 5 p.m. the discipline was removed. Workers were paid a half day.</p>
<p>In Southern California AT&amp;T is cracking down on bathroom breaks for inside workers. Managers say “lost time” should equal no more than two hours a month—about five minutes a day. Local 9503 steward Wynter Hawk says managers keep track, letting workers know how much they’ve used. They call it “a courtesy.”</p>
<p>“I say, ‘Your courtesy is kind of like harassment,’” she said. “Do they think when they get to the end of the month people will just hold it?”</p>
<p>Stewards are considering a mass pee-in, in which all workers would clock out at the same time.</p>
<p>At UPS, Dan Scott, a member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, counsels fellow drivers to fight speedup by following UPS’s thick rulebook to a tee. “They encourage us to hydrate throughout the day, stretch after each break and at the beginning of the day, take all breaks and lunches in full,” he said.</p>
<p>Scott believes the union’s untapped resource is the customers.</p>
<p>“People relate to their driver, how hard they work,” he said. "They are the face of the company. How much trouble would it be for a local or the international to run an ad saying, ‘UPS is harassing your driver. Ask your driver what it’s like.’ Start that chatter.”</p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Jane Slaughter is a staff writer with <a href="http://labornotes.org/">Labor Notes</a>. </div></div></div>
Wed, 29 Jul 2009 21:00:01 -0700Jane Slaughter, Labor Notes657097 at http://www.alternet.orgEconomyCivil LibertiesEconomyLaborlaborworkplaceunionsupsLabor Rallies for Health Care, But Keeps it Vaguehttp://www.alternet.org/story/141084/labor_rallies_for_health_care%2C_but_keeps_it_vague
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Itâ€™s no secret that the union movement is divided on health care reform.</div></div></div>
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>It’s no secret that the union movement is divided on health care reform. Resolutions favoring “Medicare for All,” a single-payer system, have been passed by 558 unions, central labor councils, state federations, and other union organizations. Yet in practice leaders of many of those same unions have acted as if actual single-payer legislation (Representative John Conyer’s HR 676 and Senator Bernie Sanders’ S703) didn’t exist.</p>
<p>They’ve promoted milder changes that will leave private insurance companies in place, instead of kicking them out of the temple, as every other industrialized country—from Canada to Japan—has done. In effect, labor’s leaders are placing on the table first what logically should be their fall-back position.</p>
<p>They’ve gone along with the D.C. consensus that the most that can be won is a plan that includes a “public option” to compete in the marketplace with private companies. And they’re not wrong about the unwillingness of this Congress to buck the system. Conyers was asked in May, “What would it take this Congress to pass single payer?” He replied, “Nuclear weaponry.”</p>
<p>Even so, the staunchest single-payer advocates believe they will win most by continuing to agitate for what they really want rather than a compromise. These folks see large amounts of activists’ anger and energy wasted.</p>
<h3>RALLY FOR?</h3>
<p>A big June 25 rally at the Capitol sponsored by the AFL-CIO and Health Care for America Now (HCAN), both of which steer clear of single payer, was attended by 7,000 people. But the organizers “didn’t know what to get them fired up about,” said Mark Dudzic of the Labor Campaign for Single Payer.</p>
<p>“It was a good, high-spirited group of people, who want to fight, who honestly believe they’re fighting for national health care,” he said. “A lot of the focus of the rally was to mobilize anger at private insurance companies, and it’s tragic where the leaders want to leave those folks.”</p>
<p>John Armelagos, grievance chair at the University of Michigan Professional Nurse Council, said the rally and subsequent lobbying visits were well-scripted but light on details. Every speaker, Democratic leaders and union heads alike, promised that any health care bill that emerged would include some “public option,” and most participants cheered.</p>
<p>“They thought that would save the day,” he said. “It was all very fluid and not concrete.”</p>
<p>When New York’s Senator Chuck Schumer kicked off the rally with a speech heavy on rally slogans, a large group of single-payer supporters in front began chanting “we want single payer.” He ignored them, and the rally marshals walked them to the back of the crowd.</p>
<p>Armelagos said the rally’s most specific speaker, AFSCME President Gerald McEntee, attacked a proposed tax on already existing health-care benefits, an idea gaining popularity among Democratic senators. The intent is to raise part of the estimated $1.2 trillion needed to expand coverage using the current private-insurance model. (Such a tax would hit many union members, who enjoy better-than-average coverage.)</p>
<p>Obama campaigned last year against John McCain’s proposal to tax benefits, but now won’t rule the idea out. Armelagos left D.C. frustrated that labor’s efforts are now devoted to fighting a position taken by Republicans in the last election, leaving wide open other crucial questions.</p>
<p>For instance, if most insurance will still be provided by employers, he asks, “does that mean people who don’t have jobs won’t have coverage?”</p>
<p>Madelyn Elder, president of Communications Workers (CWA) Local 7901, talked to rally participants who said over and over they’d prefer single payer “because it would be the cheapest and easiest way, but there’s no way we’d get it passed in Congress.” A subsidiary variation included, “I’d hate to lay off all those people who work in the private health insurance industry.”</p>
<p>While visiting senators, Armelagos’s group noted that Democrats outmuscled Republicans to pass Medicare four decades ago, making the program so popular that 13 GOP senators jumped on board.</p>
<p>He and other United American Nurses union delegates endorsed a single-payer health care system at their 2007 convention, but he’s convinced today’s Democrats don’t have the fortitude to stand up to the health care lobby. So, he thinks, it’s better to get something than nothing.</p>
<p>“If single payer doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell—even if three of four citizens want a national health plan—we’ve got to get something now,” he said. “There’s too many folks out there hurting real bad.”</p>
<h3>BETTER THAN NOTHING?</h3>
<p>Is something better than nothing? It’s too soon to predict what will come out of the wrangling—the insurance industry’s Harry-and-Louise-type commercials that helped sink health care reform in 1994 haven’t even started yet. But we can imagine three possible scenarios.</p>
<p>1. <b>The whole reform debate collapses of its own weight</b>. Dudzic predicts that people will resist the unpopular elements that would have to be included to pay the high price of keeping private insurance at the core of the system. Those include “individual mandates,” as in Massachusetts’s plan, that require each person to buy his or her own coverage (like car insurance). Private insurers have lured away the healthiest of the population, saddling the state with the sickest and leaving Massachusetts’s mandates under strain. Limits were placed on enrollment this year and services, including dental coverage, were cut.</p>
<p>Taxation of existing health care benefits, a poison pill for unions, is also likely to be broadly unpopular. Members of Congress who get an earful from their constituents during the August recess may well decide that no bill is worth the cost of alienating many voters (and campaign donors).</p>
<p>2. Compromise legislation will be <b>so unfavorable to working and poor people that even the most eager compromisers in the labor movement feel they must oppose it</b>. A tax on benefits, an HMO-like public option so restricted it’s doomed to fail, a subsidy plan that fails to relieve working people of the high cost of insurance—any combination of these could be a cure worse than the disease.</p>
<p>Even then, some unions could be tempted to support a bad bill in hopes it will serve their particular ends. A union focused on organizing low-wage workers, for example, finds the cost of benefits a main reason why employers fight organizing drives so hard. The Service Employees (SEIU), with its homecare, childcare, and security guard drives, is a case in point. If a new government health care program subsidized benefits for poor workers, perhaps their employers would be more open to signing deals that let the union in the door.</p>
<p>Another factor that could cause some unions to support even a bad bill is the desire not to displease the Obama administration. They want the Employee Free Choice Act, and they may hope that making nice over health care reform could win them points. This is the “if I let you kick me once, you won’t feel the need to kick me twice” school of unionism.</p>
<p>According to Dudzic, the desire not to make waves extends even to the insurance companies. “The view,” he says, “is that we can’t piss off the insurance companies because they’ll run Harry-and-Louise ads, but they’re going to do it anyway.”</p>
<p>3.<b>A bill will be good enough that most labor leaders feel they should support it</b>. A bill that mandates that employers pay for insurance and includes a decent public option would be seen by some as a victory, by others as a livable compromise. SEIU paved the way this week when it released a letter co-signed with Wal-Mart that supports forcing most employers to offer insurance to workers.</p>
<p>However, this is the least likely of the three options. As Obama has signaled his willingness to go along with just about anything, more and more activists are convinced that any public option will be only lip service.</p>
<p>In fact, at an AFL-CIO meeting in mid-June, some affiliate representatives pushed AFL-CIO political operative Gerry Shea to say where the federation would draw the line on the parameters of a public option. Shea wouldn’t say, but some fear that the real answer is “wherever Obama tells us.” Mark Gaffney, head of the Michigan AFL-CIO, volunteered to write to the federation asking for clarity on its lobbyists’ bottom line.</p>
<p>One union, CWA, highlighted its demands as it dispatched hundreds of delegates from its yearly convention to the D.C. rally: a public option, no taxes on working people’s benefits, retiree health care for those not yet Medicare-eligible, and a “play or pay” option for all employers.</p>
<p>Taxing benefits is the deal-killer for most unions. Given how universally unions oppose such a plan, it indicates the disregard for labor in the administration and Congress that the idea was even floated.</p>
<p>Thirty-one union presidents signed a letter to senators arguing against such a regressive tax. Of course, in a tactic long used with members, union leaders may later claim that keeping taxation of benefits out of the final bill equals a victory.</p>
<h3>THE DARK HORSE</h3>
<p>Though it’s a long shot, the best outcome might be a bill that allows the states to experiment with single payer. Voters in California have approved a single-payer system for their state twice, only to be vetoed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.</p>
<p>Senator Sanders of Vermont is backing such a provision, and Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio is organizing support in the House. Some single-payer lobbyists are trying to get a state option attached to other legislation.</p>
<p>“Enabling states to do single payer actually moves us closer to a single-payer solution than a public option does,” said Michael Lighty, the California Nurses Association’s director of public policy. Lighty said that a successful program in a big state like California would lead other states to follow suit. He pointed out that in Canada, single-payer health care was initially adopted one province at a time, leading eventually to a federal system.</p>
<p>“But if you pass a plan that’s watered down and bad, you’ve squandered the political moment,” Lighty said. “You’re going to fuel the cynicism and distrust so many people already have in what can be accomplished in Washington.”</p>
<h3>BARGAINING TACTICS</h3>
<p>Say you’re a union bargainer who thinks her members deserve a dollar-an-hour raise, but believes that realistically the company won’t give more than 50 cents. Would you start out by asking for 50 cents? Yet that’s what union lobbyists are doing, in effect, around health care reform in D.C. this year. It’s how labor has been doing its politics for a while now: behaving as supplicants rather than as actors trying to define the game, consenting to the accepted wisdom.</p>
<p>Ironically, the desire to be “relevant” and at the table is leaving much of official labor with little actually to say. The tragedy of this year’s morass, say unionists passionate about universal health care, is that any legislation that stitches insurance companies into the heart of the health care system now makes it that much harder to get them out of the way later.</p>
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<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Jane Slaughter is a staff writer with <a href="http://labornotes.org/">Labor Notes</a>, where this article first appeared. </div></div></div>
Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:00:01 -0700Jane Slaughter, Labor Notes656617 at http://www.alternet.orgPersonal HealthPersonal HealthLaborlaborhealth careunionslobbyistssingle payerorganized laborpublic optionBankruptcy Would Be Tinkering Around the Edges of Detroit's Problemshttp://www.alternet.org/story/134393/bankruptcy_would_be_tinkering_around_the_edges_of_detroit%27s_problems
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">If the car companies are too big to fail, too poorly run to put right, itâ€™s time to take them over.</div></div></div>
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>Bankruptcy talk for the troubled automakers GM and Chrysler is accelerating, and President Obama—as well as the companies themselves—is raising the frightening prospect of mass layoffs and plant closings.</p><p>If the car companies are too big to fail, too poorly run to put right, it’s time to take them over. But Obama made a point of ruling out a takeover this week, saying that the government doesn’t want to run the companies. If they can’t present turnaround plans that restore them to profitability, he prefers bankruptcy—which, without significant alterations, will be a disaster for wide swaths of the Midwest.</p><p>Obama insists that GM and Chrysler submit to “fundamental restructuring.” He issued a call for the auto industry to remake itself along the lines seen in World War II. Then, the U.S. desperately needed war material, and Detroit had the factories and the willing workers. Within weeks the “Arsenal of Democracy” was churning out machines of war instead of four-door sedans, and the government poured money into Michigan to make it happen, spending $56 billion in today’s dollars over the war years.</p><p>The Arsenal of Democracy resulted not from private initiative, not from patiently waiting for the “ingenuity” of executives, but because government demanded it.</p><h3>TOO HALF-HEARTED</h3><p>This moment is crying out for that kind of resolve, not the half-hearted jawboning Obama described on Monday. GM’s problems can’t be solved by a symbolic (and well-compensated) firing of the CEO. What’s needed is to transition shuttered auto plants into a new transportation and energy sector that can wean us from oil. Obama should insist that the dozens of excess auto factories be put to work building clean cars, mass transit, and those 6,000 components of a wind turbine.</p><p>While he’s at it, he should dump the employer-based health care system that, at the Big 3, is about to collapse.</p><p>That’s because our jobs, health care, energy, environment, and transportation problems are all linked, and solving them means connecting the hip bone to the thigh bone: With car sales plummeting 41 percent last month and no bottom in sight, Detroit’s automakers could shutter upwards of 30 factories and still meet current demand. Auto workers face tens of thousands of job losses and billions of dollars in benefit cuts. A million retirees and their families could lose health care. The highways and bridges we depend on are falling to pieces. Those highways feed sprawling suburbs brimming with foreclosed homes.</p><p>Let’s address all those problems at the same time. In other countries, it’s called an “industrial policy,” a comprehensive strategy to make sure we’re investing wisely. (It’s no accident that Spain and Denmark make the world’s wind turbines now, and that France and Japan make its railcars.)</p><h3>WHAT’S THE ALTERNATIVE?</h3><p>The alternative is putting failing auto companies through what industry insiders are calling a “quick rinse”: a pre-packaged bankruptcy that would start by tearing up the contractual obligations made to former workers as they labored for decades. First on the chopping block are “debt obligations,” the code name for money promised for retiree health care through the voluntary employee beneficiary association (VEBA).</p><p>Obama furthered the likelihood of bankruptcy this week by guaranteeing that service warranties would be honored if that happened. GM, too, has softened its tone on bankruptcy recently.</p><p>Company executives must be coming to understand what other corporations have long known: a trip into Chapter 11 has been the excuse for airlines, steelmakers, and other companies to gut union contracts, impose layoffs, and destroy the jobs that promised a pension, health care, and decent wages in exchange for 30 years of intensely demanding work.</p><h3>HOW’S IT WORK?</h3><p>In bankruptcy, the company proposes a restructuring plan to the bankruptcy judge, which in three months must settle all debts, restructure contracts, and pay off the financers who kept the business running during bankruptcy. (These financers are known as “debtors-in-possession.”)</p><p>Bankruptcy judges and their “bankruptcy masters,” who are appointed by the court to handle the day-to-day negotiations, use the power granted to them in the bankruptcy code to shred contracts and force unions to take concessions.</p><p>Though their future wages, pensions, and benefits are being decided, workers often have no say in these negotiations, under current rules.</p><p>Usually the best case for labor is to get a rump-end seat on the least-important committee, the unsecured creditors committee, where labor reps can plead with other committee members and the bankruptcy master to try and get a few scraps thrown their way.</p><p>The debtor-in-possession financer, meanwhile, jumps to the head of the line in terms of who gets paid first by the bankrupt company.</p><p>Not only is it paid first, the debtor-in-possession is also the key decision-maker in restructuring. Workers at auto-parts supplier Delphi discovered this when the private equity firm Appaloosa Partners provided bankruptcy financing and dramatically reshaped the company.</p><h3>ANY LIGHT IN THIS TUNNEL?</h3><p>GM’s or Chrysler’s bankruptcy would be disastrous for millions of workers and their families. Entire communities would be emptied of decent jobs and retirees could see pensions and health care coverage gutted. GM’s auditor predicted in early March that bankruptcy could mean 47,000 jobs lost and 14 additional plant closures. That doesn’t even begin to suggest the impact of the failure of up to 100 parts suppliers, a likelihood, according to a UAW researcher’s estimates.</p><p>The time is ripe for bolder action, but if Obama insists on bankruptcy, he should rewrite the script for bankruptcy proceedings to avoid this kind of devastation. Here’s three modest proposals.</p><p><b>Have the government function as the “debtor-in-possession”</b> financer. Running the show would give us the leverage we need to break with car-dependent transportation and put the engineers and the plants to work on the transit of the future.</p><p><b>Don’t let the car companies shop around for friendly judges</b>. Bankruptcy courts are often chosen by companies based on their willingness to rule in favor of employers. That should be out of the question. And because the government is driving the reorganization, the bankruptcy master should be designated by the White House, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Transportation.</p><p><b>Set up a labor committee</b>. Instead of shunting labor to the side, put it on an equal footing with the creditors’ committees. Give the labor committee input into the governance and planning of the company under bankruptcy, including veto power on the “plan of reorganization.”</p><p>Of course, the bankruptcy czar could just push for concessions, and a labor committee under the control of the current UAW leadership could just stand meekly alongside the same executives that dragged the companies into the ground. They’ve chosen to do so, so far.</p><p>“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” said Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff.</p><p>But that’s what he and his boss are doing with the auto industry—throwing billions at a sinkhole and making workers pay for their bosses’ mistakes.</p><p>We could use this moment to craft an industrial policy that marries good blue-collar jobs, pensions, and health care to a green economy. Bankruptcy, unless we rewrite it, is a one-way ticket to disposable jobs in a hollowed-out Midwest.</p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Mark Brenner, Mischa Gaus and Jane Slaughter are editors at <a href="http://labornotes.org/">Labor Notes</a>, the country's largest cross-union magazine writing from a workers' perspective. </div></div></div>
Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:00:01 -0700Jane Slaughter, Mischa Gaus, Mark Brenner, Labor Notes654651 at http://www.alternet.orgEconomyEconomyobamabankruptcybig threeSlashing Wages Will Hurt Workers, But It Won't Save the Big Threehttp://www.alternet.org/story/110417/slashing_wages_will_hurt_workers%2C_but_it_won%27t_save_the_big_three
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Some conservatives are using inaccurate numbers to pin the blame for Detroit&#039;s pain on union workers.</div></div></div>
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p><i>The following op-ed appeared in the <a href="http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081204/OPINION01/812040350/0/SPECIAL">Detroit News</a> Thursday, December 4.</i></p><p>In the 1980s, Chevrolet proclaimed itself the "Heartbeat of America," but today the American auto industry barely registers a pulse. As Washington considers Detroit's plea for life support, the only place where pundits, politicians and Big Three executives seem to agree is that auto workers must make do with less or watch their jobs disappear.</p><p>Some lawmakers have complained that unions are the source of the problem, but they fail to understand some inconvenient truths. According to the latest figures from the U.S. Commerce Department, every worker in Big Three factories could work for free and only shave 5 percent off the cost of their cars. The auto companies pay as much for hubcaps and fenders as they do in wages.</p><p>Data from the Harbour Report -- the industry's gold standard -- reveal that even including their benefits, labor costs in the Big Three's plants account for less than 10 percent of the sticker price.</p><p>No matter how you cut the numbers, demolishing auto workers' living standards will not transform the industry. The Big Three have been trying for years. They have slashed at least 200,000 jobs since 2004, and they last year wrung billions of dollars in concessions from the United Auto Workers. The union instituted a second-tier wage of $14.50 an hour for new hires, lower than pay in the nonunion, foreign-owned auto companies in the South.</p><p>The impact is all too apparent in auto communities across the Midwest. Forty thousand Detroit homeowners are in foreclosure, and the unemployment rate has hit double digits in many auto towns. That suffering will multiply if one of the Big Three collapses, or if retired auto workers are punished for decisions they had no hand in.</p><p>Automakers' decisions have been disastrous. While competitors developed gasoline-electric hybrids, Detroit mined the gas-guzzling truck and SUV market, making $104 billion in profits between 1994 and 2003. Wall Street and Congress weren't calling for more research and development or curbing the company's dividend payments and high-flying executive salaries back then.</p><p>Pundits crow for us to "Dump Detroit," but they don't advertise that through a bailout or the bankruptcy courts taxpayers will shoulder the burden of the automakers' colossal missteps.</p><p>Washington shouldn't back into a bailout -- it should jump in feet-first. What's needed is not a half-measure, a cash infusion in exchange for selling the corporate jets. Now is the time to take a sweeping look at the country's needs.</p><p>Our first steps should confront global warming and oil dependence through a comprehensive overhaul of the transportation system. Federal policy hasn't changed since the 1950s, when gas was a nickel a gallon.</p><p>Detroit, the Arsenal of Democracy, retooled in a matter of weeks when we needed tanks, not cars, in 1941. We could produce this century's answer to the interstate highway system and build mass transit and high-speed trains.</p><p>That same sense of urgency is needed for vehicles that don't run on petroleum. If American engineers can build satellites that read your license plate from outer space, they can develop an alternative to the gasoline engine.</p><p>Automakers need direction as much as financial support from Washington, just as Japan's government molded Toyota into a world-class performer.</p><p>In every other industrialized nation, government has stepped in and given their auto companies a significant edge. Most important, they all adopted national health care and pension systems decades ago.</p><p>General Motors alone provides health coverage to a million people -- workers, retirees and families. The annual price tag is about $5 billion, which, as CEO Rick Wagoner is fond of pointing out, is more than GM spends on steel.</p><p>That burden could be lifted, to the benefit of 47 million uninsured Americans, by adopting a Medicare-style program for everyone. It would save the nation as much as $350 billion per year now spent for insurance companies to shuffle paper and deny claims.</p><p>The fate of the Motor City captivates us because it speaks to our future. For 30 years, politicians have bowed to Wall Street, sitting by while wages for most workers stagnated. Big Three workers have maintained their living standards better than most, in no small part because they have a union. In a country where investment bankers gave themselves $30 billion in bonuses last Christmas, have we reached a point where $58,000 a year with benefits is too much to ask?</p><p>We once promised the pursuit of happiness to all, including the workers who make our factories run, not just those who trade credit default swaps. Now more than ever, we need to recapture that spirit with a thoroughgoing plan to rescue the environment, care for the sick and transform transportation.</p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Mark Brenner and Jane Slaughter work for Labor Notes, an independent monthly labor magazine in Detroit. It receives no support from the United Auto Workers. </div></div></div>
Mon, 08 Dec 2008 06:00:01 -0800Jane Slaughter, Mark Brenner, Labor Notes651974 at http://www.alternet.orgEconomyEconomyfordgmuawchryslerdetroitbig threeEnd of the Road: Is the Auto Industry Dead?http://www.alternet.org/story/107489/end_of_the_road%3A_is_the_auto_industry_dead
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">With U.S. car makers billions of dollars in the red, jobs vanishing and factories closing, the industry&#039;s problems may be insurmountable.</div></div></div>
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p><em>Editor's note: As politicians in Washington debate the future of the U.S. auto industry, we are reposting this article from the September 2006 issue of</em><i>Labor Notes</i><em>. It spells out the how the Big 3 got into the mess they are in today, and what the UAW -- together with the rest of the labor movement -- needs to do to get us out.</em></p><p>In the 1980s Chevrolet proclaimed itself the "Heartbeat of America." Today many would say that the American auto industry qualifies for life support. Last November, General Motors (owner of the Chevy brand) announced that it was cutting 25,000 jobs and closing up to 12 factories by 2008.</p><p>The news came one month after auto parts giant Delphi declared bankruptcy, promising to shutter at least a dozen plants and cut as many as 24,000 jobs in three years time. Ford completed the grim hat trick in January, revealing a plan to cut 30,000 jobs by 2012.</p><p>Just months before, GM and Ford had convinced Solidarity House, headquarters of the once-mighty United Auto Workers, to make $1 billion in concessions to help pay for retired auto workers' health benefits. Detroit is abuzz over the additional give-backs the Big Three auto makers (GM, Ford, and DaimlerChrysler) are likely to wrest from the union in next year's contract talks, and the rank-and-file hear no tough talk -- let alone action -- from their leaders.</p><p>On the face of it, the industry's problems seem almost insurmountable. Collectively, U.S. car makers are billions of dollars in the red and foreign competitors continue to gobble up the Big Three's market share. America's auto giants boost their bottom line only by selling gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs, and cars would be moving off the lots even slower were it not for thousands of dollars in incentives used to sweeten each sale.</p><p>In the face of these pressures, it's no surprise that analysts from the Motor City to Wall Street are convinced that this is the end of an era in the auto industry. There is no alternative, these experts lament. Today's auto workers will have to make do with less or kiss their jobs goodbye.</p><p>For over a century the auto industry has been an anchor for the U.S. economy and a trendsetter for corporate America. What does the current upheaval mean for workers? Announcing the company's bankruptcy, Delphi's CEO Steve Miller signaled what was at stake: "I want you to view what is happening at Delphi as a flash point, a test case, for all the economic and social trends that are on a collision course in our country and around the globe."</p><p>The auto industry paid out a living wage for millions of working-class people. Is Detroit about to call an end to that life?</p><p><strong>What's Good for GM ...</strong></p><p>Times weren't always so tough in the Motor City. On the heels of World War II America's auto manufacturers were the undisputed titans of industry. Although UAW President Walter Reuther began his tenure with visions of government-provided pensions and health care for all Americans, that drive was blunted when the union achieved, at the bargaining table, a private welfare state for its members at the Big Three.</p><p>In addition to private insurance and 30-years-and-out retirement benefits, they also received "supplemental unemployment benefits" to cushion the blow when the cyclical nature of the industry brought about layoffs -- a step toward Reuther's social democratic dream of a guaranteed annual wage. Besides their 3 percent annual raises to compensate for productivity improvements, auto workers also received cost-of-living increases, and, as the decades rolled on, tuition and legal services were added as well.</p><p>Unions in steel and rubber followed suit with similar contracts and, to a lesser extent, other blue-collar workers such as miners, telephone workers, truckers, and electrical workers all attempted to follow the UAW's lead. The pattern of steady wage increases together with health and retirement benefits stretched well beyond heavily unionized industries, setting a higher standard for all the nation's employers, union and non-union alike.</p><p><strong>Gold-Plated Sweatshops</strong></p><p>The ratcheting productivity that allowed for these benefits was good for the bottom line but it meant that the factories continued to be, in Reuther's words, "gold-plated sweatshops." The foundry and the assembly line remained an inhuman way to make a living. The common pattern was for workers to sign on, thinking to stay just a few years, but to be seduced by the benefits -- and then say to themselves "it's only 30 years."</p><p>The mind-numbing drudgery, the high injury rates, the heat and smoke and oil in the air led many workers to hit the bottle -- and, in one famous case, led black Detroit Chrysler worker James Johnson to pick up a gun and shoot two supervisors and a co-worker. A jury, after a plant tour, found that brutal working conditions and Chrysler's shop-floor racism had literally driven Johnson insane.</p><p>Removed from the daily grind of factory life, however, UAW officials became far more attuned to the gold-plating in the shops than to the sweat. They sought gains they could measure in dollars, and Reuther's belief in the benefits of technology and productivity kept him from protesting either automation or speedup. Officials came to see themselves as partners with management, truly convinced that "what's good for GM is good for America," and for UAW members.</p><p>This outlook ensured that a host of management initiatives -- and stupidities -- went unchallenged. Early on, the UAW abandoned Reuther's fight for low car prices; later, it joined auto manufacturers in lobbying against higher fuel economy standards. The UAW also embraced its role as guarantor of orderly industrial relations, repudiating the tactics that gave birth to the union in the 1930s.</p><p><strong>The Path Downwards</strong></p><p>These years of collaboration and quiescence left the union ill prepared for the crisis that shook the auto industry in 1979. The UAW once again blazed a trail the rest of the labor movement would soon follow-only this time it was the path of concessions and explicit labor-management cooperation.</p><p>Through postwar recessions and expansions, it had not occurred to American employers that signed contracts could be breached. But when Lee Iacocca's Chrysler Corp. threatened bankruptcy in the fall of 1979, the UAW stepped up to the plate. Chrysler workers and retirees broke the once-sacrosanct pattern contract, taking concessions estimated at $203 million, $2,000 per worker, nonrecoverable.</p><p>More cuts soon followed; by January 1981 Chrysler workers were collectively a billion dollars behind. The next year, with the economy and the industry in full-blown recession, the union opened pacts at Ford and GM to make cuts there.</p><p>Describing the new bargaining climate, a steel industry official told the Wall Street Journal, "The whole posture of negotiating is changed. Basically we're asking for something that we're not entitled to." A staffer for the United Food and Commercial Workers noted, "After Chrysler, everything changed."</p><p>Employers from meatpacking to airlines to education demanded and got wage cuts. In Michigan, the hospital workers union reported that every hospital it bargained with in 1982 used the argument "GM took a wage freeze." Companies used economic hard times to force a redistribution of power in their own favor.</p><p><strong>Accepting Competition</strong></p><p>As important as the monetary concessions was an explicit change in union philosophy: acceptance of the notion that it is the union's job to make the employer more "competitive."</p><p>Workers were to contribute their ideas for boosting productivity, including speedup and job cuts. This "team concept" quickly spread from auto throughout manufacturing and beyond. The flagship team concept plant jointly run by GM and Toyota in Fremont, California, became the most famous factory in America and the site of manager-pilgrims from every walk of life, seeking the secrets of productivity.</p><p>In essence, the UAW's deal with the auto makers was this: do whatever you need to do to boost profits, as long as you maintain the wages and benefits of (a steadily shrinking number of) workers at the Big Three. That "whatever" included lean production, outsourcing to nonunion parts plants at home and abroad, the sale of GM's and Ford's parts divisions in 1999 and 2000 (lopping off 52,000 workers) and, today, buyouts. There were 466,000 GM hourly workers in 1978 and in 2006, 112,000.</p><p><strong>Buoyed by the Bubble</strong></p><p>After a decade-long downturn, the 1990s was like winning the lottery for Detroit's auto makers. Mini-vans, one of the Big Three's only bright spots in the 1980s, continued to register solid sales, hovering at about 8 percent of the total domestic car and truck market.</p><p>And because their Japanese rivals were slow to introduce their own models, Detroit maintained its dominance, with market share never dipping below 75 percent.</p><p>But the Big Three's real gold mine was the phenomenal growth of sports utility vehicles (SUVs) during the 1990s, rising from 7 percent of the total car and truck market at the beginning of the decade to roughly 20 percent by the end. And sales really took off in the latter half of the 1990s, when most Americans saw their real wages inch up for the first time in 15 years.</p><p>Concerns over fuel efficiency also seemed to melt away, with gas prices averaging a little over a dollar a gallon for most of the decade. As with mini-vans, Detroit's foreign rivals lagged behind, leaving the Big Three to dominate the SUV market.</p><p>Bolstered by strong sales in these new niches, together with skyrocketing stock prices, Detroit's auto giants hoped to reclaim the global dominance that had seemed to slip through their fingers a decade earlier.</p><p>In addition to expanding their existing global operations, the Big Three also engineered some very high- profile mergers and strategic investments, acquiring the Saab, Fiat, Suzuki, Daewoo, Jaguar, Volvo, and Land Rover brands. Investments, of course, can flow in both directions, and in 1998 Chrysler was acquired by Daimler-Benz.</p><p><strong>Spin-offs and Restructuring</strong></p><p>Detroit auto makers were also busy reshaping their domestic operations. They spun off their parts divisions into stand-alone companies and then negotiated steep wage cuts for new-hires there. GM hived off American Axle and Delphi, while Ford created Visteon.</p><p>Chrysler took outsourcing to a new level by pioneering "modular production" in the U.S. At its Jeep plant in Toledo, body work, chassis and paint -- considered the core of auto assembly--will soon be performed on-site by non-Chrysler workers at lower pay.</p><p>GM and Ford also paid less and less attention to producing cars, focusing instead on their financial services arms, with General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC) and Ford Credit adding more and more heft to each company's bottom line. Indeed, by 2000 both GMAC and Ford Credit accounted for a third of net revenue for their respective companies.</p><p><strong>Mixed Bag for Workers</strong></p><p>For America's auto workers, the 1990s were decidedly more mixed. On the one hand, after a decade of bruising concessions and plant closings, everyone was relieved to see the return of both jobs and steady wage increases.</p><p>On the other hand, much of the new investment coming into the industry was from foreign companies -- Toyota, Mazda, BMW, Nissan, Honda, Mercedes -- who sprinkled factories first on the outer edges of the Midwest auto corridor and then across the right-to-work South. These "transplants" kept their factories non-union, as did the auto parts industry that mushroomed in the 1990s, as the Big Three replaced vertical integration with outsourcing.</p><p>Union density in auto, which in the dog days of the 1980s declined from 62 percent to 50, fell even faster in the prosperous 1990s, dropping to 37 percent by the year 2000. The UAW proved unwilling or unable to organize these newcomers, and one can only wonder whether things might be different today had the union summoned up some of the spirit, energy, and vision that drew hundreds of thousands of unorganized auto workers into the union in the 1930s.</p><p>Instead the UAW concentrated on the state of its existing members, securing promises of new investment and job security from the Big Three both in contract talks and through job actions. For example, a 54- day strike at two strategic GM parts plants in 1998 idled most of General Motors' North American operations, and resulted in $200 million in new investment in the two plants.</p><p>Unfortunately for the UAW, its fight to protect its shrinking store of good jobs was swimming against a much stronger national tide. The 1990s witnessed an explosion in income inequality, in no small part due to skyrocketing CEO pay (71 times workers' average wages in 1989, rising to 300 times by 2000) and a stock market run-up of historic proportions. The longest economic expansion since World War II did surprisingly little for those in the lower rungs of the income distribution, in part because of the declining share of the workforce represented by unions.</p><p>Adding to the insecurity were large-scale retrenchments by the bulwarks of corporate America, including Xerox, IBM, and ATT.</p><p>Underappreciated at the time, perhaps the biggest development of the 1990s was the move from defined-benefit pension plans to 401(k)-style defined-contribution plans. This seemed of little consequence when the stock market was posting double-digit gains year-in and year-out, but when the turn of the century recession hit, baby-boomers across the nation saw their retirements vaporize. UAW members at the Big Three were some of the few to retain their original pensions.</p><p><strong>Downturn</strong></p><p>These trends collided with a deflating stock market in 2000 to create a squeeze play for the auto industry and its hourly workforce. The recession hit Detroit particularly hard, as rising gas prices turned consumers off the low-mileage SUVs and minivans that had saved Detroit's bacon a decade earlier. In the last five years the Big Three's market share has fallen from 66 percent to 58 percent, and sales would have been even worse without the deep discounts auto makers felt forced to offer.</p><p>At the same time that the domestic picture soured, many of the Big Three's global acquisitions also unraveled. General Motors, for example, paid a cool $2.4 billion to acquire a 20 percent stake in Fiat in 2000, then ponied up another $2 billion to get itself out of the deal five years later.</p><p>Ford has injected more than $5 billion into Jaguar and to this day the luxury brand remains stubbornly in the red. Meanwhile the marriage of DaimlerChrysler has hardly been a match made in heaven--the merged company is worth less today in stock market terms than Daimler was on its own before they united.</p><p>Hemorrhaging money and with no end in sight, last year Detroit's automakers took desperate measures to become smaller but more profitable companies, with Delphi declaring bankruptcy and GM and Ford putting 55,000 jobs on the chopping block. Since that time, they have all been singing the same tune, blaming their troubles on the generous wages, pensions, and healthcare of their unionized workforce.</p><p>In a move whose irony cannot be lost on executives, Detroit has redirected decades of consumer frustration with American automakers for their lackluster designs and poor quality into widespread resentment of rank-and-file auto workers for their company-paid health care and pensions. The auto makers have tapped into middle America's deep-seated anxiety and insecurity with a not-so-subtle message: "If you don't have a pension or any hint of job security, why should they?"</p><p>The scale and speed of these changes has left the UAW flat-footed, struggling to get a hearing-much less formulate a strategy-in its fight to save some of the last good manufacturing jobs in America.</p><p> </p><p><strong>So Who Cares?</strong></p><p>Cynics might argue, who cares? The UAW represents fewer than 400,000 auto workers in an industry of more than a million, and the concessions the companies are clamoring for will simply bring their wages and benefits closer to what the market will bear for less-skilled workers anyway. Besides, manufacturing is so 20th century. Aren't we a post-industrial economy with a future in services and high-tech jobs? America can design and engineer stuff and let the rest of the world build it (think X-Boxes and Ipods).</p><p>This mindset misses most of what's important about the crisis in auto. Downsizing isn't accountants shuffling numbers around on a spreadsheet; the lost jobs are concentrated in specific communities, such as the already devastated Flint, Michigan made famous by Michael Moore in his first film, Roger and Me.</p><p>Cuts of this magnitude will reverberate throughout the Midwest, leaving a lasting economic and social hangover. And they will not be confined to auto, as other companies follow the Big Three's lead.</p><p>High tech companies can't fill the void. Google, for example, has just announced plans to open up shop in Michigan. But Google employs less than 6,000 people worldwide, a drop in the bucket compared to the 70,000 jobs this round of auto restructuring will destroy.</p><p>How could the auto industry right itself without devastating workers and communities? Execs have shown themselves curiously unwilling to campaign for one measure that would save them billions of dollars per year: single-payer health insurance.</p><p>GM is the largest private purchaser of healthcare in the country, providing coverage to 1.1 million people. Last year the price tag was $5.3 billion, which, as CEO Rick Wagoner is fond of pointing out, is more than GM pays for steel. Half of those covered are retirees, and the company claims to provide healthcare to 1 percent of America's seniors.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Legacy Myths</strong></p><p>The Big Three say that such "legacy costs," which also include pension benefits, are choking their business, obscuring the fact that all three auto makers have pension and retiree health funds flush with cash--healthy for the foreseeable future. If health care is such a heavy burden, why not join the movement for a far cheaper national health care plan? Canada's single-payer system makes it much less expensive to do business there and has spared most Ford and GM plants north of the border from the ax.</p><p>But despite promises to the UAW to pursue "universal coverage" in exchange for the union's $1 billion in concessions on retiree health care last fall, GM's CEO didn't even mention national health care in testimony before a June Congressional special hearing on the nation's healthcare crisis. Either free-market ideology is trumping good business sense, or paying for benefits is not such a burden after all -- or the employers don't mind having a propaganda hammer to use against the union.</p><p>When Henry Ford introduced the five-dollar day in 1914 he famously quipped that he wanted to pay his workers enough so that they could afford to buy his cars. Today, a new-hire at Delphi or Visteon now makes $14.50 an hour, a bit more than half his or her counterparts at the Big Three. In 2007, when new agreements are negotiated, the Big Three's new-hires are sure to take a hit.</p><p>What will America look like if most workers earn Wal-Mart, instead of General Motors, wages? For those without a four year college degree - i.e., about 70 percent of the labor force - average wages (adjusted for inflation) have stagnated or fallen for the last 30 years, hovering under $15 today. Manufacturing jobs paid wages no better than the economy-wide average when Henry Ford was perfecting the assembly line, but by the end of the 20th century they were about 25 percent above average, in no small part due to unions like the UAW.</p><p><strong>A New Playbook</strong></p><p>To solve the industry's problems, many analysts have urged Detroit executives to go back to the drawing board and start fresh. This advice applies with even more force to the UAW.</p><p>Forged in the 1930s' social upheaval, the UAW's pioneers originally saw the union as just one piece of a large-scale social movement to solve the problems of the Great Depression.</p><p>Today the stakes are higher than they have been in 60 years, but the UAW is still fumbling through its golden-age playbook. The rank-and-file revolt after the Delphi bankruptcy demonstrates that members are willing to fight, but they can't do it alone.</p><p>Now, more than ever, the UAW needs the audacity and the guts of its founders, who set their sights on more than the survival of their union headquarters. Their fight to build a better world inspired millions.</p><p>With health care becoming less and less attainable for more and more working people, the fight for national single-payer health care has the potential to galvanize a new workers' movement. Rekindling such a movement may be the only way to ensure that the UAW founders' legacy doesn't evaporate before our eyes.</p><p> </p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Mark Brenner is the Director of Labor Notes.
Jane Slaughter is a founder of Labor Notes. </div></div></div>
Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:00:01 -0800Jane Slaughter, Mark Brenner, Labor Notes651541 at http://www.alternet.orgEconomyEconomyeconomyuawauto industryUnions Talk Race as Election Nearshttp://www.alternet.org/story/101999/unions_talk_race_as_election_nears
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Will Obama&#039;s record on economic issues be enough to overcome some union members&#039; race prejudice?</div></div></div>
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Labor leaders who want desperately to chase the Republicans from the White House are confronting a hurdle in their outreach to members: the question of race. Obama's record on economic issues, they say, should put him way ahead of John McCain with working-class voters. But will the facts be enough to overcome some members' deep-seated prejudice?<br /><br />"We have people disguise it by saying he doesn't have enough experience, or they're not comfortable voting for him," says Kyle McDermott, field director in the Steelworkers' political department. "And we have people come at us and say, 'Look, I'm not going to vote for a black person.' They don't use as kind words as I just did."<br /><br />Henry Nicholas, a vice president in the public employees union AFSCME, tells of a white member at a Philadelphia hospital who a few weeks ago hung a noose up at work. (He was fired.)<br /><br />"There's nobody in America," he says, "who, when they have their thinking caps on, believes that racism has disappeared. This [election] is an opportunity to overcome it and deal with it. It won't disappear unless we work on getting rid of it."<br /><br /><b>The Union Vote Matters</b><br /><br />Union households were 24 percent of the electorate in 2004. That year, as in 1996 and 2000, union-household voters went 59 percent for the Democrat. AFL-CIO says 65 percent of union members casting a ballot chose John Kerry over George Bush.<br /><br />After years of all-out effort, with hundreds of millions of dollars and untold staff time poured into campaigning, it might be hard to be believe that only 59 percent of voters in union households members pull the lever for a Democrat.<br /><br />In 2000 and 2004, that wasn't enough. Winning union voters and their families by an even larger margin is crucial to Obama's chances to win the presidency this year. Pat Gillespie, president of the Philadelphia Building Trades Council, says, "You'd think it would be a 70-30 split, but it's almost even, and the only reason I can attribute it to is the color of his skin."<br /><br />And in a special edition of his union's newsletter, John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), bemoaned polls that show union members too close to splitting their votes down the middle.<br /><br />"Why then is it close?" Gage asked. "Many, including me, think race. Union leaders have felt the sting of anonymous e-mails and coded language at union meetings."<br /><br /><b>What Tack to Take?</b><br /><br />A September 8-10 national poll of likely voters by Democracy Corps found that in white union households, Obama gets 44 percent of the vote, 8 points below the local Democratic candidate for Congress and 9 points below the number of those who identify as Democrats. In 2004 white union households backed John Kerry by a 52.4 percent margin.<br /><br />At the August meeting of the AFL-CIO executive council, talk was unusually frank about the need to deal with the race question. But what to do?<br /><br />Jeff Crosby, head of a central labor council near Boston, says, "There's two approaches -- one is just to talk about the class issues, not race. The other is more complicated: let's talk about race.<br /><br />"In any legislative campaign we have this issue. It's the one moment people are actually willing to talk. Do you try to do education in that teachable moment? Or do you just try to get the vote?"<br /><br />Most unions are trying to get the vote by any means necessary, but some see this election as part of unions' responsibility to challenge racism, whether it's in the voting booth or in the shop.<br /><br />"You've got to break down all of those barriers that stop us from respecting the guy we work next to," said Donna Dewitt, president of the South Carolina AFL-CIO.<br /><br />Speaking to the Steelworkers convention in July, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Rich Trumka said, "There's no evil that's inflicted more pain and more suffering than racism -- and it's something we in the labor movement have a special responsibility to challenge."<br /><br />The Steelworkers are instructing their political activists how to deal with bogus charges made against Obama, from the flag-pin flap to "is he a Muslim?"<br /><br />One of the Steelworkers' talking points, "Racism," says, "There are a thousand good reasons to support Barack Obama, and one really bad reason to not support him -- and that's the color of his skin."<br /><br />Organizers are then instructed to "pivot back" to the union's key economic talking points on jobs, trade, and health care.<br /><br />"In 2004 we had the wedge issues -- guns, God, and gays," McDermott says. "Unions don't have a position on those pieces, so our message to our membership and activists was always, 'Don't talk about those issues.'<br /><br />"But the blatant falsehoods out there about Obama -- we have talked to our members and trained our activists to address them but then work our way back to the issues we care most about as a union."<br /><br />The 2.5-million-member AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department polled its members in battleground states and found Obama leading McCain 55-30 percent -- not enough. To discover the pressure points, it held focus groups with white members who were leaning to McCain or undecided.<br /><br />The department then produced and distributed a video in which a white painter from Chicago tells viewers that getting the best man is what's important, not his skin color.<br /><br /><b>Indirect Mail</b><br /><br />Many union campaigners for Obama, though, are reluctant even to raise the race question. They fear they'd put fence-sitters on the defensive, which could backfire.<br /><br />As Trumka told the Steelworkers, "I don't think we should be out there pointing fingers in people's faces and calling them racist."<br /><br />Bill Lucy, secretary-treasurer of AFSCME, says, "We recognize that people might have a problem with [Obama's race], but you can't focus on trying to correct it because you don't know who they are!<br /><br />"The big game plan is to go to people with the issues. McCain is opposed to everything they want. The core issues are strong enough to outweigh the latent racism that exists."<br /><br />If past trends hold, white union members will vote Democratic in greater proportions than the general white population. The question is, how much greater?<br /><br />Whether their unions address race head on, sideways, or not at all, it's clear that members will have a lot more on their minds than pocketbook issues on November 4.<br /><br />Says Sharon Pinnock, organizing director for AFGE, "The last couple of elections the fear has been about the terrorist threat. Whether we have some members out there who have a different kind of fear -- that can be just as dangerous."<br /><br /><i>Paul Abowd, Mischa Gaus, and Tiffany Ten Eyck contributed to this article.</i><br /><br /><i>Sign up for AlterNet's free, daily <a href="http://www.alternet.org/newsletter/subscribe/?group=60622" target="_blank">election newsletter</a> to get the most important, timely information about Election '08.</i> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Jane Slaughter is a Detroit freelance writer and frequent contributor to the Metro Times. </div></div></div>
Tue, 07 Oct 2008 08:00:01 -0700Jane Slaughter, Labor Notes650353 at http://www.alternet.orgNews & PoliticsElection 2008EconomyraceobamaunionsCorporate America Trying to Make Union Activities Illegalhttp://www.alternet.org/story/80464/corporate_america_trying_to_make_union_activities_illegal
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">&quot;This is a terrible menace to rights of free speech and protest, and constitutional rights and freedom of expression.&quot;</div></div></div>
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Is it illegal for an activist group or union to criticize a company's business practices? Is it a "conspiracy" if advocates call for boycotts, organize rallies, or press for resolutions from elected bodies?<br /><br />Smithfield Foods, the largest producer of pork products in the world, is hoping so, after a lawsuit it filed last October passed an initial court challenge. The suit aims to halt the United Food and Commercial Workers' campaign to unionize 4,600 workers in its Tar Heel, North Carolina, slaughterhouse. The company is using a 1970 statute originally designed to battle gangsters' extortion schemes -- the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).<br /><br />"This is a terrible menace to rights of free speech and protest, and constitutional rights and freedom of expression," said Lance Compa, Cornell University labor relations professor and an expert on the meatpacking industry. "It's a really dangerous new offensive that employers have seized on to try to snuff out legitimate protest about abusive employer conduct."<br /><br />Jobs with Justice, which is named as a defendant in the suit, is launching a campaign against corporations' use of the RICO act, which has surfaced intermittently as one legal tactic among an arsenal to silence corporate critics. The act has been used to file suits in recent months against campaigns by the Service Employees (SEIU) at the Wackenhut security firm, and the UFCW at an Arizona-based grocery chain.<br /><br />JWJ expects to work with unions, central labor councils, and city councils to pass fresh resolutions condemning the lawsuit.<br /><br />"Our goal is to protect the right of not only unions to engage in these activities, but everybody fighting corporate abuses," said Russ Davis, director of Massachusetts JWJ. "Hopefully we can deter corporations from going down this road. But if these things occur again we want to be ready."<br /><br /><b>A VAST CONSPIRACY?</b><br /><br />Smithfield sees a wide array of plotters conspiring against it, naming UFCW, JWJ, Research Associates of America, and Change To Win, the labor federation to which the UFCW belongs. Also named are eight individuals, including UFCW President Joe Hansen, the union's Smithfield campaign director Gene Bruskin, and Andy Stern, SEIU president.<br /><br />The defendants' supposed crime? They employed strategies long used by unions and social movements to educate the public, garner support, and pressure corporations.<br /><br />Since the UFCW's Justice at Smithfield campaign began in June 2006, the union has asked city councils to pass resolutions and boycott Smithfield products, demonstrated at stockholder meetings, and filed health and safety complaints with OSHA. Stores in Massachusetts pulled Smithfield products from their shelves.<br /><br />All these actions the company cites in its lawsuit as evidence of "formation of the conspiracy," "delivery of the threat," and "publication of false, misleading, baseless, negative and/or damaging information on the Internet and in the newspapers."<br /><br />"Whatever economic consequences flow, they are not considered in the law sufficient to deprive people of free speech," said Joan Bertin, director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, a member of the anti-RICO coalition.<br /><br />The union said it had to turn to an aggressive campaign for consumer and community support because Smithfield repeatedly violated laws that are supposed to allow workers to organize.<br /><br />The UFCW has lost two National Labor Relations Board elections at the plant, both of which were overturned after reams of unfair labor practice charges were sustained against the company. Smithfield's violations include firing workers for talking about the union, and attempts to spy on and intimidate them.<br /><br /><b>"A TERRIBLE DISTRACTION"</b><br /><br />"They're trying to box us into a slow, NLRB process, because it doesn't punish them for violations -- all (workers) get is back-pay and reinstatement," said Renee Bowser, UFCW's assistant general counsel.<br /><br />Court-watchers doubt the suit will survive. A similar RICO suit brought by Detroit's newspapers last decade against striking newspaper workers ultimately failed.<br /><br />"This form of coalition building, holding demonstrations -- all of these are classic forms of freedom of association, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly," Compa said. "Ultimately the case won't hold up. In the meantime it's a terrible distraction."<br /><br />For more information, see JWJ's <a href="http://www.jwj.org/campaigns/freespeech.html">Free Speech at Risk</a>. <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Jane Slaughter is a Detroit freelance writer and frequent contributor to the Metro Times. </div></div></div>
Tue, 25 Mar 2008 21:00:01 -0700Jane Slaughter, Labor Notes645559 at http://www.alternet.orgEconomyEconomyLaborlaborseiuandy sternricosmithfield hamsufcwchange to winjobs for justiceBoring Meetings and Weird Parentshttp://www.alternet.org/story/1946/boring_meetings_and_weird_parents
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The daughter of radical hippies, Lisa Michaels looks back on growing up in the good fight.</div></div></div>
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Split: A Counterculture Childhoodby Lisa MichaelsHoughton Mifflin, $23, 307 pp.I read Split: A Counterculture Childhood because I was looking for tips. It's the memoir of Lisa Michaels, born in 1966 and raised by parents who were a political radical (dad) and an anti-materialist semihippie (mom). For political parents, our greatest fear is that our children will be rebels -- against us, that is. When Michaels was interviewed by Terry Gross on National Public Radio, I got the impression that she wasn't an activist, but agreed with her parents' political convictions. Good enough, I thought. Let's find out how they did it. It seems to me that, in general, radical parents do a pretty good job of passing on their values to their kids. But it seems likely that, in an era such as ours, when exciting movements are few and far between, "politics" could come to be equated, in a child's mind, with "boring meetings" and "Mom not home to tuck me in." Michaels says her father's countless meetings were indeed boring and hard to understand, but at least they were held in her living room. She dragged her feet about going to rallies for affirmative action or farmworkers, and her feelings about being there, logically enough, changed with the circumstances: "I was full of self-congratulatory heroism when it looked like the public mood was in our favor. But when the turnout was slim, or it rained, or the police walked the streets in riot gear, I shrank back. ... We were few and weak. They could crush us under their thumbs." Michaels describes the things she missed, or was embarrassed by, because of her mother's values. In kindergarten, "I soon learned how other families spent their nights. Half the recess chatter involved recounting the previous evening's television shows -- a whole world I knew nothing about." She watches "Tom and Jerry" at the neighbor's whenever she can. She observes the strange dinnertime rituals at her friend's house -- saying grace, asking to be excused at the end of the meal -- and begs her parents to teach her etiquette. Her mother feeds her mostly out of her huge garden, and bakes her own bread ("dark, of course"), while Charlene and Jill next door get white bread and bologna, Lucky Charms and potato chips. Michaels nags her mother to wear blush and mascara. In second grade, the kids make fun of the "hippie girl" because she keeps her paper in a red velvet box made by her mother, instead of in a binder. Here Michaels voices an ambivalence that recurs: "To join in the shrill laughter would betray my mother's thoughtfulness, and yet part of me blamed her for sending me into the world without proper equipment." In high school, she yearns for a suburban tract house.What's more striking than Michaels' perceived deprivations and embarrassments is the guilt she often felt. The way I read it, some of this was because her father was a bit of a jerk. A former Weatherman, he had moved to the Bay Area and joined a Maoist group. At the end of each summer visit -- the two parents split up when Michaels was 4 months old -- Michaels and her father and stepmother would do "criticism/self-criticism" of her stay. How was her relationship with her stepmother progressing? How was the daycare? How was Michaels' own behavior? Michaels says she entered into these reviews enthusiastically. Her father urges her to read a biography of Paul Robeson, for self-improvement. Her stepmother gives her a book on Chinese revolutionary youth, ever noble. Passing a porn theater is one of many opportunities for an earnest moral lesson. Even her mother's customary send-off is "think of the other guy." Dad writes in one of her book-gifts that there are two kinds of people in the world: Those who live for themselves and those who live for others. What kind of trip is that to lay on a child? At one point, Dad scares 12-year-old Michaels by turning the living room stereo up loud (to foil possible bugs) and telling her he may have to move to Kentucky to help the coal miners. It's a "crucial fight," and surely the assistance of an outside agitator from California is just what they need. The effect on Michaels is often, not always, feelings of fear and guilt. "I wanted to slip into the bland flow of passersby; I wanted to live a life that aroused no suspicion or trouble ... I would lie in bed despairing over my lack of courage. I was afraid that if I had lived in Nazi Germany, if I had been a Christian with an empty attic, I would have turned the Jews away." The comforts of her life -- compared to those of migrant farmworkers, living in cardboard boxes -- make her feel afraid, because she's done nothing to deserve them. On the other hand, her father's politics lead him to not waste time yelling or moralizing over certain subjects. When she's caught shoplifting, she writes, "If my father had tried to speak of profit margins or the businessman's right to a fair buck, I would have laughed through my teeth. He had spent his life questioning the rights of big capital; he certainly wasn't going to take their side over a vial of eye drops." Instead his advice is practical: "They're cracking down on this kind of thing. It's not worth it anymore." Despite a certain heavy-handedness, in the end Michaels seems to feel that her parents have sent her into the world with proper equipment. She's a beautiful writer, with many an evocative phrase that makes you know just how it was (and wonder how she can remember so well). At her wedding (planned for a year and catered, in contrast to her parents' and stepparents' casual trips to city hall), she thinks, "I'd become what they had given me, a girl with enough wild days to fill a story, and the faith to think I could tell it."Jane Slaughter can be contacted at <a href="mailto:metrotimes@metrotimes.com">metrotimes@metrotimes.com</a>. <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
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Tue, 16 May 2000 21:00:00 -0700Jane Slaughter, Detroit Metro Times585707 at http://www.alternet.orgNews & Politics